Stability and lawlikeness

Biology and Philosophy 28 (5):833-851 (2013)
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Abstract

There appear to be no biological regularities that have the properties traditionally associated with laws, such as an unlimited scope or holding in all or many possible background conditions. Mitchell, Lange, and others have therefore suggested redefining laws to redeem the lawlike status of biological regularities. These authors suggest that biological regularities are lawlike because they are pragmatically or paradigmatically similar to laws or stable regularities. I will review these re-definitions by arguing both that there are difficulties in applying their accounts to biology and difficulties in the accounts themselves, which suggests that the accounts are not adequate to redeem the lawlike status of biological regularities. Finally, I will suggest a new account of laws that also shows how non-laws might function in some of the roles of laws

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Jani Raerinne
University of Helsinki

Citations of this work

Typology and Natural Kinds in Evo-Devo.Ingo Brigandt - 2021 - In Nuño De La Rosa Laura & Müller Gerd (eds.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology: A Reference Guide. Springer. pp. 483-493.
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References found in this work

How the laws of physics lie.Nancy Cartwright - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Structure of Science.Ernest Nagel - 1961 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):275-275.
The Structure of Biological Science.Alexander Rosenberg - 1985 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

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