Law Statements

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.