Law Statements
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 1947. |
Introductions | Psillos 2002 |
- Anti-Realism about Laws (113)
- Best-Systems Analyses (110)
- Ceteris Paribus Laws (194)
- Humeanism and Nonhumeanism about Laws (235)
- Laws as Relations between Universals (114)
- Necessitarianism about Laws (179)
- Nomological Necessity (178)
- Probabilistic Laws (63)
- Special Science Laws (186)
- Laws of Nature, Misc (482)
- Explanation and Laws (138)
- Causation and Laws (168)
- Dispositions and Laws (178)
- Confirmation (1,126 | 515)
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David Bourget (Western Ontario) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: David Bourget Gwen Bradford Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers James Chase Rafael De Clercq Ezio Di Nucci Barry Hallen Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Michelle Kosch Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Manolo Martínez Matthew McGrath Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Giuseppe Primiero Jack Alan Reynolds Darrell P. Rowbottom Aleksandra Samonek Constantine Sandis Howard Sankey Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell Aness Kim Webster Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers |