Wrong, George MacKinnon, 1860-1948, Canadian historian. He was professor of history at the Univ. of Toronto from 1894 until his retirement in 1927. He was the author of many works on early colonial American and Canadian history, including The Conquest of New France (1910), The Fall of Canada (1914), Washington and His Comrades in Arms (1921), The Rise and Fall of New France (2 vol., 1928), and Canada and the American Revolution (1935). With H. H. Langton he edited Chronicles of Canada (32 vol., 1914-16).

A wrong or being wrong is a concept in law, ethics, and science. In a colloquial sense, wrongness usually refers to a state of incorrectness, inaccuracy, error or miscalculation in any number of contexts. More specifically, being "wrong" refers to a situation wherein an individual has made an error or misjudgment.

Ethics

In ethics, wrong is the opposite of right. In a relativist consideration of ethics, the factors affecting the way different cultures determine norms for what is wrong form part of the subject-matter of anthropology.

Law

In law, a wrong can be a legal injury, which is any damage resulting from a violation of a legal right. It can also imply the state of being contrary to the principles of justice or law. It means that something is contrary to conscience or morality and results in treating others unjustly. If the loss caused by a wrong is minor enough, there is no compensation, which principle is known as de minimis non curat lex. Otherwise, damages apply.

Science

A scientific concept is said to be wrong if it can be used to make specific predictions of the results of experiments, but those predictions do not correspond with physical reality (i.e. the concept can be falsified in the Popperian sense, and has also been shown to be false). Wolfgang Pauli is said to have coined the phrase "not even wrong" to describe concepts that cannot be falsified (either because they do not refer to measurable effects, or because they are too incoherent to be used to make predictions).

See also

• Evil
• Goodness and value theory
• Guilt
• Guilt (law)
• Justice
• Right
• Liz Moore

References

• Willis, Hugh. Principles of the Law of Damages. The Keefe-Davidson Co.: St. Paul, 1910.