A pragmatist challenge to constraint laws

Metascience 27 (1):19-25 (2017)
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Abstract

Meta-laws, including conservation laws, are laws about the form of more specific, phenomenological, laws. Lange distinguishes between meta-laws as coincidences, where the meta-law happens to hold because the more specific laws hold, and meta-laws as constraints to which subsumed laws must conform. He defends this distinction as a genuine metaphysical possibility, such that metaphysics alone ought not to rule one way or another, leaving it an open question for physics. Lange’s distinction marks a genuine difference in how a given meta-law can be used in explanations. Yet, I argue, it is not simply an empirical matter as to whether a given conservation law is a constraint or a coincidence. There is no set matter of fact about the world that determines this, and physics alone will not be able to return a determinate verdict on a law-by-law basis, even while there is a genuine difference between any given law as constraint and as coincidence. Rather, the difference marks different ways of treating the same law in a theoretical setting: by shifting the explanatory context, treating the same law as part of a different mathematical structure, it can be a genuine constraint and a genuine coincidence. The difference between constraint and coincidence relates to the way in which we use a law in specific theoretical and explanatory settings. Because the same law can appear in multiple contexts, it can be used in these genuinely different ways, without itself ‘‘really’’ being either one or the other as some atomistic empirical fact. Conservation laws as constraints and conservation laws as coincidences are both genuine theoretical roles that the same law can play. I conclude by considering how this pragmatist construal of constraints versus coincidences reveals how two parts of Lange’s work in this section of the book are unexpectedly independent of one another.

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Holly K. Andersen
Simon Fraser University

Citations of this work

Trueing.Holly Andersen - 2023 - In H. K. Andersen & Sandra D. Mitchell, The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Explanations by Constraint: Not Just in Physics.Marc Lange - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (4):265-277.

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References found in this work

What Makes a Scientific Explanation Distinctively Mathematical?Marc Lange - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3):485-511.
Precis of Because Without Cause: Non‐Causal Explanations in Science and Mathematics.Marc Lange - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):714-719.
Complements, not competitors: causal and mathematical explanations.Holly Andersen - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (2):485-508.
Complements, Not Competitors: Causal and Mathematical Explanations.Holly Andersen - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (2):485-508.

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