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Law Statements
Edited by Markus Schrenk (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Assistant editor: Daian Bica (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
About this topic
| Summary | Next to the
ontological status of laws of nature, their linguistic representation can be of
interest. Questions regarding law statements include which logical features are
characteristic of law statements (universal quantification, conditional
statements, material vs. counterfactual conditionals, modal operators… etc.),
whether there even is such a thing as a general common form of such statements,
whether there is always or even essentially a mathematic form, differential
equations for example, what distinguishes statements of laws from accidental
generalizations, and so forth.
These questions relate, in particular, to the “lawlikeness”-debate that dates back to logical empiricism, whose proponents focused on language analysis as the central method to solve philosophical problems. The guiding idea to define what a law of nature is was, for example, to split the problem into two parts: first, say what necessary and sufficient features statements, i.e., linguistic entities, must have in order to be counted as expressions of laws. Call those statements that fulfill the criteria -- like universality, containing only natural predicates, having conditional form, etc. -- "lawlike". Then, second, say that a law of nature (the ultimate target of the enquiry) is a true lawlike statement. Thus, overall, there are two separate tasks to tackle: find criteria for lawlikeness, then find out whether the respective statements are true (the latter task leads straight into conformation theory and its problems; see philpapers for confirmation). It should be said that no necessary or sufficient set of pure syntactic nor semantic criteria could ever be given. |
| Key works | The seminal papers are Goodman 1954 and Hempel & Oppenheim 1948, see also the last chapter of Reichenbach 1980. |
| Introductions | Psillos 2002 |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Humeanism and Nonhumeanism about Laws (294)
- Nomological Necessity (192)
- History: Laws of Nature (61)
- Laws of Nature, Misc (526)
See also
- Confirmation (1,172 | 535)
Contents
74 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 74 |
- Algorithmic Randomness and Probabilistic Laws.Jeffrey A. Barrett & Eddy Keming Chen - manuscriptWe consider two ways one might use algorithmic randomness to characterize a probabilistic law. The first is a generative chance* law. Such laws involve a nonstandard notion of chance. The second is a probabilistic* constraining law. Such laws impose relative frequency and randomness constraints that every physically possible world must satisfy. While each notion has virtues, we argue that the latter has advantages over the former. It supports a unified governing account of non-Humean laws and provides independently motivated solutions to (...)
- Phenomenological Laws and Mechanistic Explanations.Gabriel Siegel & Carl F. Craver - 2024 - Philosophy of Science 91 (1):132-150.In light of recent criticisms by Woodward (2017) and Rescorla (2018), we examine the relationship between mechanistic explanation and phenomenological laws. We disambiguate several uses of the phrase “phenomenological law” and show how a mechanistic theory of explanation sorts them into those that are and are not explanatory. We also distinguish the problem of phenomenological laws from arguments about the explanatory power of purely phenomenal models, showing that Woodward and Rescorla conflate these problems. Finally, we argue that the temptation to (...)
- Relativity Theory as a Theory of Principles: A Reading of Cassirer’s Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie.Marco Giovanelli - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2):261-296.In his Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie, Ernst Cassirer presents relativity theory as the last manifestation of the tradition of the “physics of principles” that, starting from the nineteenth century, has progressively prevailed over that of the “physics of models.” In particular, according to Cassirer, the relativity principle plays a role similar to the energy principle in previous physics. In this article, I argue that this comparison represents the core of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation of relativity. Cassirer pointed out that before and after (...)
- The Metaphysics of Bohmian Mechanics: A Comprehensive Guide to the Different Interpretations of Bohmian Ontology.Vera Matarese - 2023 - De Gruyter.The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive guide to the metaphysics of Bohmian mechanics. Bohmian mechanics is a quantum theory that describes the motion of particles following trajectories that are determined by the quantum wave-function. The key question that the theory has to face relates to the ontological interpretation of the quantum wave-function. The main debate has mostly centered around two opposing views, wave-function realism on the one hand, and the nomological view on the other hand. The (...)
- Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Laws in Avicennian Philosophy.Mehran Najafi & Abdolrasoul Kashfi - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 25 (1):53-73.Avicenna has aimed to establisha harmonized philosophical system that incorporates logic, epistemology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and other types of knowledge. Although he has not directly written anything about the metaphysical foundations of science, we believe that there are some implications in his philosophy that could be considered astruthmakers of scientific propositions. As natural law is significantly correlated to “experiment”, we will first discuss the epistemological aspect of experiments in Avicennian philosophy. He believes that the observation of a repeated event could (...)
- Scientific explanation as ampliative, specialized embedding: the case of classical genetics.José Díez & Pablo Lorenzano - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-25.Explanations in genetics have intriguing aspects to both biologists and philosophers, and there is no account that satisfactorily elucidates such explanations. The aim of this article is to analyze the kind of explanations usually given in Classical (Transmission) Genetics (CG) and to present in detail the application of an account of explanation as ampliative, specialized nomological embedding to elucidate the such explanations. First, we present explanations in CG in the classical format of inferences with the explanans as the premises and (...)
- The Power to Govern.Erica Shumener - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):270-291.I provide a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern the evolution of events. I locate the source of governance in the content of law propositions. As such, I do not appeal to primitive notions of ground, essence, or production to characterize governance. After introducing the account, I use it to outline previously unrecognized varieties of governance. I also specify that laws must govern to have two theoretical virtues: explanatory power as well as a (...)
- Metafyzická nutnost v neosadrijské škole a hodnocení nezbytných teorií přírodních zákonů.Javad Darvish Aghajani - 2021 - Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science 43 (1):33-57.To differentiate between the laws of nature and accidental generalizations, we must adopt a view of necessity that is capable of being realized in relationships existing among natural objects. In neo-Sadraian Islamic philosophy, metaphysical necessity is accepted as part of the cause-effect relationship. This paper compares the neo-Sadraian interpretation of necessity and necessitarian theories about the laws of nature, particularly essentialism and universal theory. By resorting to specific forms al-shûrat al-naw’iyyah, the origin of the essential properties of natural objects, I (...)
- Hempel’s Raven Revisited.Andrew Bollhagen - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (3):113-137.The paper takes a novel approach to a classic problem—Hempel’s Raven Paradox. A standard approach to it supposes the solution to consist in bringing our inductive logic into “reflective equilibrium” with our intuitive judgements about which inductive inferences we should license. This approach leaves the intuitions as a kind of black box and takes it on faith that, whatever the structure of the intuitions inside that box might be, it is one for which we can construct an isomorphic formal edifice, (...)
- Das Exemplarische und der Naturgesetzbegriff.Andreas Hüttemann - 2021 - In Michela Summa & Karl Mertens (eds.), Das Exemplarische – Orientierung für menschliches Wissen und Handeln. mentis. pp. 175-191.The paper explores the relation of the concepts of an exemplar and that of a law of nature.$101.00 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation
Bookmark - Empiricism and Philosophy of Physics.Lars-Göran Johansson - 2021 - Cham: Springer Verlag.This book presents a thoroughly empiricist account of physics. By providing an overview of the development of empiricism from Ockham to van Fraassen the book lays the foundation for its own version of empiricism. Empiricism for the author consists of three ideas: nominalism, i.e. dismissing second order quantification as unnecessary, epistemological naturalism, and viewing classification of things in natural kinds as a human habit not in need for any justification. The book offers views on the realism-antirealism debate as well as (...)
- Should Special Science Laws Be Written into the Semantics of Counterfactuals?Daniel Dohrn - 2019 - Kairos 22 (1):86-108.Adam Elga has presented an anti-thermodynamic process as a counterexample to Lewis’s default semantics for counterfactuals. The outstanding reaction of Jonathan Schaffer and Boris Kment is revisionary. It sacrifices Lewis’s aim of defining causation in terms of counterfactual dependence. Lewis himself suggested an alternative: «counter-entropic funnybusiness» should make for dissimilarity. But how is this alternative to be spelled out? I discuss a recent proposal: include special science laws, among them the laws of thermodynamics. Although the proposal fails, it serves to (...)
- Leyes científicas: dos dogmas de la filosofía analítica.María Alicia Pazos - 2018 - Ciudad de México: UACM, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México.Se aborda el problema de qué es una ley científica. Se analiza la concepción tradicional hempeliana sobre la posibilidad de caracterizar una forma lógica para los enunciados de ley científica, que las distinguiría de las regularidades accidentales, concluyendo que ello no es posible. Se analiza entonces el problema de cómo es posible la predicción a partir de enunciados de ley, si no hay diferencia lógica con afirmaciones de regularidad, buscando criterios que permitan el establercimiento de afirmaciones proyectables. Correlativamente se trata (...)
- Laws are conditionals.Toby Friend - 2016 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 6 (1):123-144.The ubiquitous schema ‘All Fs are Gs’ dominates much philosophical discussion on laws but rarely is it shown how actual laws mentioned and used in science are supposed to fit it. After consideration of a variety of laws, including those obviously conditional and those superficially not conditional, I argue that we have good reason to support the traditional interpretation of laws as conditionals of some quantified form with a single object variable. I show how this conclusion impacts on the status (...)
- Obtaining Laws Through Quantifying Experiments: Justifications of Pre-service Physics Teachers in the Case of Electric Current, Voltage and Resistance.Ricardo Karam - 2015 - Science & Education 24 (5-6):699-723.The language of physics is mathematics, and physics ideas, laws and models describing phenomena are usually represented in mathematical form. Therefore, an understanding of how to navigate between phenomena and the models representing them in mathematical form is important for a physics teacher so that the teacher can make physics understandable to students. Here, the focus is on the “experimental mathematization,” how laws are established through quantifying experiments. A sequence from qualitative experiments to mathematical formulations through quantifying experiments on electric (...)
- Is There an Intrinsic Criterion for Causal Lawlike Statements?Julien Blondeau & Michel Ghins - 2012 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (4):381-401.A scientific mathematical law is causal if and only if it is a process law that contains a time derivative. This is the intrinsic criterion for causal laws we propose. A process is a space-time line along which some properties are conserved or vary. A process law contains a time variable, but only process laws that contain a time derivative are causal laws. An effect is identified with what corresponds to a time derivative of some property or magnitude in a (...)
- Reply to Israel on the New Riddle of Induction.Robert Kowalenko - 2012 - Philosophia 40 (3):549-552.Israel 2004 claims that numerous philosophers have misinterpreted Goodman’s original ‘New Riddle of Induction’, and weakened it in the process, because they do not define ‘grue’ as referring to past observations. Both claims are false: Goodman clearly took the riddle to concern the maximally general problem of “projecting” any type of characteristic from a given realm of objects into another, and since this problem subsumes Israel’s, Goodman formulated a stronger philosophical challenge than the latter surmises.
- O problemach w definiowaniu pojęcia prawa przyrody.Adrian A. Ziółkowski - 2012 - Filozofia Nauki 20 (2).The article is a critical commentary on explication of the notion of law of nature based on the concept of counterfactual proposition. The view in question was originally proposed in the 40’s of past century by Roderick M. Chisholm and Nelson Goodman (further referred to as ‘CG criterion’) and has been popular among philosophers ever since.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Laws and lawmakers: Science, metaphysics and the laws of nature * by Marc Lange.A. Drewery - 2011 - Analysis 71 (3):599-601.Marc Lange’s new book on laws offers a restatement and development of the account he proposed in Natural Laws and Scientific Practice (Oxford University Press, 2000), henceforth NLSP, and the new material is helpfully summarized in the preface. Laws and Lawmakers presents the key idea from NLSP in a rather more reader-friendly manner – this idea being roughly that the difference between laws and accidents is that laws, unlike accidents, form a ‘stable’ set, i.e. a logically closed set of truths (...)
- Marc Lange. Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature.Christopher Belanger - 2010 - Spontaneous Generations 4 (1):266-269.In Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature, Marc Lange has presented an engagingly written, tightly argued, and novel philosophical account of the laws of nature. One of the intuitions behind the notion of a law of nature is, roughly, that of the many regularities we observe in the world there are some which appear to be due to mere happen-stance (“accidental” regularities, in the philosopher’s jargon), while others, which we call “laws,” seem to be possessed of (...)
- Lange, Marc . Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 . Pp. 280. $99.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). [REVIEW]Mark Lance & Maggie Little - 2010 - Ethics 120 (2):431-437.
- Laws and Lawmakers Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature.Marc Lange - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.Laws form counterfactually stable sets -- Natural necessity -- Three payoffs of my account -- A world of subjunctives.
- Hempel's Paradox, Law‐likeness and Causal Relations.Severin Schroeder - 2009 - Philosophical Investigations 32 (3):244-263.It is widely thought that Bayesian confirmation theory has provided a solution to Hempel's Paradox (the Ravens Paradox). I discuss one well‐known example of this approach, by John Mackie, and argue that it is unconvincing. I then suggest an alternative solution, which shows that the Bayesian approach is altogether mistaken. Nicod's Condition should be rejected because a generalisation is not confirmed by any of its instances if it is not law‐like. And even law‐like non‐basic empirical generalisations, which are expressions of (...)
- The Nature of Natural Laws.Lars-Göran Johansson - 2005 - In Jan Faye, Paul Needham, Uwe Scheffler & Max Urchs (eds.), Nature's Principles. Springer. pp. 151--166.
- Laws of nature versus system laws.Gerhard Schurz - 2005 - In Jan Faye, Paul Needham, Uwe Scheffler & Max Urchs (eds.), Nature's Principles. Springer. pp. 255--268.
- Enumerative Induction and Lawlikeness.Wolfgang Spohn - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (1):164-187.The paper is based on ranking theory, a theory of degrees of disbelief (and hence belief). On this basis, it explains enumerative induction, the confirmation of a law by its positive instances, which may indeed take various schemes. It gives a ranking theoretic explication of a possible law or a nomological hypothesis. It proves, then, that such schemes of enumerative induction uniquely correspond to mixtures of such nomological hypotheses. Thus, it shows that de Finetti's probabilistic representation theorems may be transformed (...)
- (1 other version)Laws Are Persistent Inductives Schemes.Wolfgang Spohn - 2004 - In Friedrich Stadler (ed.), Induction and Deduction in the Sciences. Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer. pp. 11--135.The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of formalizing defeasible reasoning or inductive schemes seems ideally suited to explicate the idea in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it will turn out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence (...)
- Dimensions of scientific law.Sandra D. Mitchell - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):242-265.Biological knowledge does not fit the image of science that philosophers have developed. Many argue that biology has no laws. Here I criticize standard normative accounts of law and defend an alternative, pragmatic approach. I argue that a multidimensional conceptual framework should replace the standard dichotomous law/ accident distinction in order to display important differences in the kinds of causal structure found in nature and the corresponding scientific representations of those structures. To this end I explore the dimensions of stability, (...)
- Laws, counterfactuals, stability, and degrees of lawhood.Marc Lange - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (2):243-267.I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not "broader"--at least in the most straightforward sense.) The stability distinctive of the laws is used to explicate what it would mean for there (...)
- Approximation, idealization, and laws of nature.Chang Liu - 1999 - Synthese 118 (2):229-256.Traditional theories construe approximate truth or truthlikeness as a measure of closeness to facts, singular facts, and idealization as an act of either assuming zero of otherwise very small differences from facts or imagining ideal conditions under which scientific laws are either approximately true or will be so when the conditions are relaxed. I first explain the serious but not insurmountable difficulties for the theories of approximation, and then argue that more serious and perhaps insurmountable difficulties for the theory of (...)
- Blame not the laws of nature.Joseph Agassi - 1995 - Foundations of Science 1 (1):131-154.1. Lies, Error and Confusion 2. Lies 3. The Demarcation of Science: Historical 4. The Demarcation of Science: Recent 5. Observed Regularities and Laws of Nature.
- Lawlikeness.Marc Lange - 1993 - Noûs 27 (1):1-21.
- An epistemic solution to Goodman's new Riddle of induction.Rosemarie Rheinwald - 1993 - Synthese 95 (1):55 - 76.Goodman'snew riddle of induction can be characterized by the following questions: What is the difference between grue and green?; Why is the hypothesis that all emeralds are grue not lawlike?; Why is this hypothesis not confirmed by its positive instances?; and, Why is the predicate grue not projectible? I argue in favor of epistemological answers to Goodman's questions. The notions of lawlikeness, confirmation, and projectibility have to be relativized to (actual and counterfactual) epistemic situations that are determined by the available (...)
- Confirmation and law-likeness.Elliott Sober - 1988 - Philosophical Review 97 (1):93-98.Nelson Goodman suggests that a generalization of the form “all A’s are B” is confirmable by an observed instance only if the generalization is law-like. Jackson and Pargetter deny this and give examples of how accidental generalizations can be confirmed. A possible response from Goodman appears to make these accidental generalizations look law-like, but I show it’s defective. And Jackson and Pargetter's substitute nomological condition fares no better than Goodman’s. Because of the multiplicity of possible background assumptions, I doubt that (...)
- Scientific Knowledge. [REVIEW]Wayne A. Davis - 1987 - Review of Metaphysics 41 (1):136-137.This is an extended study in the philosophy of science. Fetzer generally defends and refines the Hempelian theory of explanation, the Popperian theory of corroboration, a possible-worlds semantics for subjunctive conditionals, an intensional analysis of laws of nature, and the single-case propensity theory of probability.
- Nomo(theo)logical Necessity.Del Ratzsch - 1987 - Faith and Philosophy 4 (4):383-402.The issues of just what laws of nature are and what makes statements law-like have been more discussed than advanced. After exploring the general area and uncovering some difficulties which, I suspect, make the case even knottier than generally imagined, I argue that certain resources available only to the theist---in particular, counterfactuals of God’s freedom---may provide the materials needed for constructing solutions.
- Die Inkonsistenz empiristischer Argumentation im Zusammenhang mit dem Problem der Naturgesetzlichkeit.Dieter Wandschneider - 1986 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 17 (1):131-142.The well-known empiricist apories of the lawfulness of nature prevent an adequate philosophical interpretation of empirical science until this day. Clarification can only be expected through an immanent refutation of the empiricist point of view. My argument is that Hume’s claim, paradigmatic for modern empiricism, is not just inconsequent, but simply contradictory: Empiricism denies that a lawlike character of nature can be substantiated. But, as is shown, anyone who claimes experience to be the basis of knowledge (as the empiricist naturally (...)
- (2 other versions)Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.Nelson Goodman - 1983 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.
- Models and lawlikeness.James E. Roper - 1982 - Synthese 52 (2):313 - 323.Do analogical models ever play an essential role in scientific explanation and confirmation, or is their role (at most) heuristic? For many years scientists and philosophers have debated this question. I argue that such models may sometimes play an essential role. My argument is based on a proposal to augment Goodman''s theory of projection in order to make it easier for novel predicates (extensions) to acquire entrenchment. The heart of this proposal is the claim that analogical models may, under certain (...)
- Causes, laws, and law statements.Donald Nute - 1981 - Synthese 48 (3):347 - 369.
- Lawlikeness and the end of science.C. Z. Elgin - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (1):56-68.Although our theories are not precisely true, scientific realists contend that we should admit their objects into our ontology. One justification--offered by Sellars and Putnam--is that current theories belong to series that converge to ideally adequate theories. I consider the way the commitment to convergence reflects on the interpretation of lawlike claims. I argue that the distinction between lawlike and accidental generalizations depends on our cognitive interests and reflects our commitment to the direction of scientific progress. If the sciences disagree (...)
- HARRE, R. & MADDEN, E. H., "Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity". [REVIEW]Robert Farrell - 1979 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 57:114.
- Coextensiveness and lawlikeness.John L. King - 1979 - Erkenntnis 14 (3):359 - 363.
- Laws and counterfactuals.Peter van Inwagen - 1979 - Noûs 13 (4):439-453.
- Generality and nomological form.Mark Wilson - 1979 - Philosophy of Science 46 (1):161-164.It is usually supposed that the ‘fundamental’ laws of nature must be general, i.e. must essentially begin with a universal quantifier. Other ‘derivative’ laws may not satisfy this requirement but only because they are the logical or mathematical consequences of a set of fundamental laws. As it stands, this requirement is either too strong or trivial. Consider the Newtonian gravitational law: where FG is the impressed gravitational force on x due to y at t, ms is the mass of x, (...)
- HARRÉ, R. and MADDEN, E. H. "Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity". [REVIEW]B. Carr - 1978 - Mind 87:305.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- (1 other version)Sortal terms and natural laws.E. J. Lowe - 1978 - American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (3):253-60.
- Reichenbach's theory of nomological statements.Evan K. Jobe - 1977 - Synthese 35 (2):231 - 254.
- The nature of laws.Michael Tooley - 1977 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (4):667-98.This paper is concerned with the question of the truth conditions of nomological statements. My fundamental thesis is that it is possible to set out an acceptable, noncircular account of the truth conditions of laws and nomological statements if and only if relations among universals - that is, among properties and relations, construed realistically - are taken as the truth-makers for such statements. My discussion will be restricted to strictly universal, nonstatistical laws. The reason for this limitation is not that (...)
- The Likeness of Lawlikeness.James H. Fetzer - 1974 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1974:377 - 391.The thesis of this paper is that extensional language alone provides an essentially inadequate foundation for the logical formalization of any lawlike statement. The arguments presented are intended to demonstrate that lawlike sentences are logically general dispositional statements requiring an essentially intensional reduction sentence formulation. By introducing a non-extensional logical operator, the 'fork', the difference between universal and statistical laws emerges in a distinction between dispositional predicates of universal strength as opposed to those of merely statistical strength. While the logical (...)
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