1. Lies, Error and Confusion 2. Lies 3. The Demarcation of Science: Historical 4. The Demarcation of Science: Recent 5. Observed Regularities and Laws of Nature.

Marc Lange’s new book on laws offers a restatement and development of the account he proposed in Natural Laws and Scientific Practice (Oxford University Press, 2000), henceforth NLSP, and the new material is helpfully summarized in the preface. Laws and Lawmakers presents the key idea from NLSP in a rather more reader-friendly manner – this idea being roughly that the difference between laws and accidents is that laws, unlike accidents, form a ‘stable’ set, i.e. a logically closed set of truths (...) such that they would all still hold under any counterfactual supposition consistent with the set. So, for example, the natural laws all still hold under counterfactual suppositions such as ‘had this match been struck …’, ‘had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across’ and so on; thus this set is stable. But the set of laws plus the accidental claim ‘there is no gold cube one mile across’ fails to hold under such counterfactual suppositions because had Bill Gates wanted to build a gold cube one mile across, such a cube might well have come into existence; thus this set is not stable. While the basic outline and defence of this idea is provided in Chapter 1, those wishing to delve into the intricate …. (shrink)

First order logic does not distinguish between different forms of universal generalization; in this paper I argue that lawlike and accidental generalizations (broadly construed) have a different logical form, and that this distinction is syntactically marked in English. I then consider the relevance of this broader conception of lawlikeness to the philosophy of science.

Although our theories are not precisely true, scientific realists contend that we should admit their objects into our ontology. One justification--offered by Sellars and Putnam--is that current theories belong to series that converge to ideally adequate theories. I consider the way the commitment to convergence reflects on the interpretation of lawlike claims. I argue that the distinction between lawlike and accidental generalizations depends on our cognitive interests and reflects our commitment to the direction of scientific progress. If the sciences disagree (...) about the lawlikeness of some generalization(s), as an argument of Davidson's suggests, it follows from the interest relatively of lawlikeness that the laws of a science do not determine the essences of their objects. I conclude that this form of scientific realism provides no metaphysical support for essentialism. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that extensional language alone provides an essentially inadequate foundation for the logical formalization of any lawlike statement. The arguments presented are intended to demonstrate that lawlike sentences are logically general dispositional statements requiring an essentially intensional reduction sentence formulation. By introducing a non-extensional logical operator, the 'fork', the difference between universal and statistical laws emerges in a distinction between dispositional predicates of universal strength as opposed to those of merely statistical strength. While the logical (...) form of universal and statistical laws appears to be fundamentally dissimilar on the standard account, from this point of view their syntactical structure is basically the same. (shrink)

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.

The article is a reappraisal of the requirement of maximal specificity (RMS) proposed by the author as a means of avoiding "ambiguity" in probabilistic explanation. The author argues that RMS is not, as he had held in one earlier publication, a rough substitute for the requirement of total evidence, but is independent of it and has quite a different rationale. A group of recent objections to RMS is answered by stressing that the statistical generalizations invoked in probabilistic explanations must be (...) lawlike, and by arguing that predicates fit for occurrence in lawlike statistical probability statements must meet two conditions, at least one of which is violated in each of the counterexamples adduced in the objections. These considerations suggest the conception that probabilistic-statistical laws concern the long-run frequency of some characteristic within a reference class as characterized by some particular "description" or predicate expression, and that replacement of such a description by a coextensive one may turn a statement that is lawlike into another that is not. Finally, to repair a defect noted by Grandy, the author's earlier formulation of RMS is replaced by a modified version. (shrink)

Israel 2004 claims that numerous philosophers have misinterpreted Goodman’s original ‘New Riddle of Induction’, and weakened it in the process, because they do not define ‘grue’ as referring to past observations. Both claims are false: Goodman clearly took the riddle to concern the maximally general problem of “projecting” any type of characteristic from a given realm of objects into another, and since this problem subsumes Israel’s, Goodman formulated a stronger philosophical challenge than the latter surmises.

Laws form counterfactually stable sets -- Natural necessity -- Three payoffs of my account -- A world of subjunctives.

Traditional theories construe approximate truth or truthlikeness as a measure of closeness to facts, singular facts, and idealization as an act of either assuming zero of otherwise very small differences from facts or imagining ideal conditions under which scientific laws are either approximately true or will be so when the conditions are relaxed. I first explain the serious but not insurmountable difficulties for the theories of approximation, and then argue that more serious and perhaps insurmountable difficulties for the theory of (...) idealization force us to sever its close tie to approximation. This leads to an appreciation of lawlikeness as a measure of closeness to laws, which I argue is the real measure of idealization whose main purpose is to carve nature at its joints. (shrink)

Goodman'snew riddle of induction can be characterized by the following questions: What is the difference between grue and green?; Why is the hypothesis that all emeralds are grue not lawlike?; Why is this hypothesis not confirmed by its positive instances?; and, Why is the predicate grue not projectible? I argue in favor of epistemological answers to Goodman's questions. The notions of lawlikeness, confirmation, and projectibility have to be relativized to (actual and counterfactual) epistemic situations that are determined by the available (...) background information. In order to defend this thesis, I discuss an example that is less strange than the grue example. From the general conclusions of this discussion, it follows that grue is not projectible in the actual epistemic situation, but it is projectible in certain counterfactual epistemic situations. (shrink)

Do analogical models ever play an essential role in scientific explanation and confirmation, or is their role (at most) heuristic? For many years scientists and philosophers have debated this question. I argue that such models may sometimes play an essential role. My argument is based on a proposal to augment Goodman''s theory of projection in order to make it easier for novel predicates (extensions) to acquire entrenchment. The heart of this proposal is the claim that analogical models may, under certain (...) conditions, be the medium whereby entrenchment is passed from well established predicates to new and unfamiliar ones. (shrink)

It is widely thought that Bayesian confirmation theory has provided a solution to Hempel's Paradox (the Ravens Paradox). I discuss one well-known example of this approach, by John Mackie, and argue that it is unconvincing. I then suggest an alternative solution, which shows that the Bayesian approach is altogether mistaken. Nicod's Condition should be rejected because a generalisation is not confirmed by any of its instances if it is not law-like. And even law-like non-basic empirical generalisations, which are expressions of (...) assumed underlying causal regularities, are not so confirmed if they are absurd in the light of our causal background knowledge or if their instances are not also possible instances of the relevant causal claim. (shrink)

In this note I have presented the essentials of a view of how laws are falsified, a view which has been held by some notable philosophers but which is radically opposed to that of Professor Popper. I have not scrupled to ?improve? upon it, so the view of no one philosopher is presented. I try to show that an interesting and convincing account of scientific simplicity is implicit in the theory and I conclude by suggesting how we can bring the (...) argument to bear on the problem of the logical status of laws of nature, showing that through their manner of falsifiability, laws share some characteristics with necessary statements as well as with empirical generalizations. (shrink)

Earman and Roberts (2005) argue that a standard definition of '“empiricism about laws of nature” is inadequate, and propose an alternative definition they think is better. But their argument against the standard definition fails, and their alternative is defective.

The paper is based on ranking theory, a theory of degrees of disbelief (and hence belief). On this basis, it explains enumerative induction, the confirmation of a law by its positive instances, which may indeed take various schemes. It gives a ranking theoretic explication of a possible law or a nomological hypothesis. It proves, then, that such schemes of enumerative induction uniquely correspond to mixtures of such nomological hypotheses. Thus, it shows that de Finetti's probabilistic representation theorems may be transformed (...) into an account of confirmation of possible laws and that enumerative induction is equivalent to such an account. The paper concludes with some remarks about the apriority of lawfulness or the uniformity of nature. (shrink)

The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of formalizing defeasible reasoning or inductive schemes seems ideally suited to explicate the idea in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it will turn out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence (...) of independent, identically distributed random variables. This entails that de Finetti‘s representation theorems can be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of laws thus conceived. (shrink)

Summary The well-knownempiristical apories of the law of nature prevent until this day an adequate philosophical interpretation ofempirical science. Clarification can only be expected through animmanent refutation of the empiristical point of view. In this sense it is proved in this paper thatHume's argumentation, paradigmatic for modern empirism, is not just one-sided, but simplyinconsistent: Anyone who claimes experience to be the basis of all knowledge (as the empirist does), and, due to this, denies that the lawlike character of nature can (...) be substantiated,has, in fact, always presupposed the lawfullness of nature, i. e. has assumed theontology of a nature lawful in itself. If this lawfullness is, more closely, understood asdependency on conditions, then the functional character of the laws of nature is involved with the consequence thatverification is not only to be understood as a mere repetition of instances of the law but as a verification of theconditional texture defined in it. Furthermore does the functionality of the law of nature also include a statement on itsinvariance (against certain transformations). This throws a new light on theproblem of induction. In this kontext it cannot be surprising that the notorious neglect of the functional aspect in the context of modern empirism has led to fundamental problems with the concept of the law of nature. (shrink)

The article is a critical commentary on explication of the notion of law of nature based on the concept of counterfactual proposition. The view in question was originally proposed in the 40’s of past century by Roderick M. Chisholm and Nelson Goodman (further referred to as ‘CG criterion’) and has been popular among philosophers ever since.