What is a law of nature?
Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 36, no. 2, 1956, pp. 144–165
Abstract
The distinction between laws of nature and accidental generalizations of fact cannot be grounded in logical necessity or divine command. While natural laws describe empirical regularities, they are fundamentally distinct from coincidental truths, such as restricted historical or spatial facts. This difference is frequently identified by the capacity of law-like statements to support subjunctive conditionals, yet the source of this capacity is not found in the objective facts themselves. Instead, the status of a proposition as a law depends upon the epistemic attitude of those who assert it. A generalization is treated as a law when it is adopted as an inference warrant that remains resilient against specific hypothetical modifications. This account suggests that lawfulness is a property of the observer’s commitment to a regularity’s predictive power and its application to unobserved or possible instances, rather than an inherent feature of the external world. Consequently, the necessity associated with natural laws is a reflection of human methodology and the willingness to project patterns beyond actual observations. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
[W]hatever may be the practical or aesthetic advantages of turning scientific laws into logically necessary truths, it does not advance our knowledge, or in any way add to the security of our beliefs. For what we gain in one way, we lose in another. If we make it a matter of definition that there are just so many million molecules in every gram of hydrogen, then we can indeed be certain that every gram of hydrogen will contain that number of molecules: but we must become correspondingly more doubtful, in any given case, whether what we take to be a gram of hydrogen really is so. The more we put into our definitions, the more uncertain it becomes whether anything satisfies them.