being wrong vs. being false

The idea that all models that are wrong are necessarily all equally wrong [...] is fallacious in the extreme. Wrong does not have this black/white feature. 'Wrong' and 'false' are not the same. Of course, a wrong theory is also false, but if I'm walking to the shop, I'd rather find my location to be wrong by half a mile than by a hundred miles.

We can say that a theory is less wrong (i.e. produces smaller residuals), without implying that is is more true. 'True' and 'false' retain their black-and-white character, as I believe they must, but our knowledge of what is true is necessarily fuzzy. This is precisely why we use probabilities. As our theories get incrementally less wrong and closer to the truth, so the probabilities we are allowed to assign to them get larger. -- Parameter Estimation and the Relativity of Wrong, Tom Campbell-Ricketts