Laws of Nature, Misc Edited by Markus Schrenk (Nottingham University)

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  • Yuri Balashov, What is a Law of Nature? The Broken-Symmetry Story.
    I argue that the contemporary interplay of cosmology and particle physics in their joint effort to understand the processes at work during the first moments of the big bang has important implications for understanding the nature of lawhood. I focus on the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking responsible for generating the masses of certain particles. This phenomenon presents problems for the currently fashionable Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong theory and strongly favors a rival nomic ontology of causal powers.
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  • Yuri Balashov, Laws of Physics and the Universe.
    Are the laws of nature real? Do they belong to the world or merely reflect the way we speak about it? And if they are real, what sort of entity are they? These questions have been intensely debated by philosophers. Modern cosmology, however, has given such questions a new twist by introducing a unique perspective on physical reality, the perspective which I shall call the cosmological point of view. In this perspective, the universe as a whole presents itself as a (...)
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  • Yury V. Balashov (1992). On the Evolution of Natural Laws. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (3):343-370.
    's argumentation in favour of essential invariability of the fundamental laws of nature is critically examined. It is contended that within the realist framework Poincareé's arguments lose their apodictical force. In this sense the assumption of inconstancy of even the fundamental laws of nature is methodologically legitimate.
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  • Helen Beebee (2009). John Foster the Divine Lawmaker. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (2).
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  • Alexander Bird (2006). Looking for Laws. Metascience 15:441-54.
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  • Alexander Bird (2002). Laws and Criteria. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32:511-42.
    Debates concerning the analysis of the concept of law of nature must address the following problem. On the one hand, our grasp of laws of nature is via our knowledge of their instances. And this seems not only an epistemological truth but also a semantic one. The concept of a law of nature must be explicated in terms of the things that instantiate the law. It is not simply that a piece of metal that conducts electricity is evidence for a (...)
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  • Alexander Bird (1999). Explanation and Laws. Synthese 120 (1):1--18.
    In this paper I examine two aspects of Hempel’s covering-law models of explanation. These are (i) nomic subsumption and (ii) explication by models. Nomic subsumption is the idea that to explain a fact is to show how it falls under some appropriate law. This conception of explanation Hempel explicates using a pair of models, where, in this context, a model is a template or pattern such that if something fits it, then that thing is an explanation. A range of well-known (...)
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  • Simon Bostock (2003). Are All Possible Laws Actual Laws? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (4):517 – 533.
    Suppose it is a law that all Fs are G. Does the law hold in all possible worlds? According to Necessitarianism, it holds in at least all those worlds containing F-ness. I argue that the Necessitarian must also take the law to hold in all those possible worlds which do not contain F-ness. Accepting the principle that a law can only hold in a world if it has some ontological grounding in that world, I argue that Necessitarianism is committed to (...)
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  • Robert N. Brandon (1997). Does Biology Have Laws? The Experimental Evidence. Philosophy of Science 64 (4):457.
    In this paper I argue that we can best make sense of the practice of experimental evolutionary biology if we see it as investigating contingent, rather than lawlike, regularities. This understanding is contrasted with the experimental practice of certain areas of physics. However, this presents a problem for those who accept the Logical Positivist conception of law and its essential role in scientific explanation. I address this problem by arguing that the contingent regularities of evolutionary biology have a limited range (...)
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  • Mario Bunge (1961). Kinds and Criteria of Scientific Laws. Philosophy of Science 28 (3):260-281.
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  • John Carroll (2008). Nailed to Hume's Cross? In Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics. Blackwell Pub..
    Some scientists try to discover and report laws of nature. And, they do so with success. There are many principles that were for a long time thought to be laws that turned out to be useful approximations, like Newton’s gravitational principle. There are others that were thought to be laws and still are considered laws, like Einstein’s principle that no signals travel faster than light. Laws of nature are not just important to scientists. They are also of great interest to (...)
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  • John W. Carroll (1987). Ontology and the Laws of Nature. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65 (3):261 – 276.
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  • Nancy Cartwright (1997). Where Do Laws of Nature Come From? Dialectica 51 (1):65–78.
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  • Dennis Des Chene, Eternal Truths and Laws of Nature.
    Are the laws of nature among the eternal truths that, according to Descartes, are created by God? The basis of those laws is the immutability of the divine will, which is not an eternal truth, but a divine attribute. On the other hand, the realization of those laws, and in particular, the quantitative consequences to be drawn from them, depend upon the eternal truths insofar as those truths include the foundations of geometry and arithmetic.
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  • John Earman (1978). The Universality of Laws. Philosophy of Science 45 (2):173-181.
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  • A. S. Eddington (1920). The Meaning of Matter and the Laws of Nature According to the Theory of Relativity. Mind 29 (114):145-158.
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  • Evan Fales (1990). Causation and Universals. Routledge.
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  • John Foster (2001). Regulatities, Laws of Nature, and the Existance of God. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 101 (2):145–161.
    The regularities in nature, simply by being regularities, call for explanation. There are only two ways in which we could, with any plausibility, try to explain them. One way would be to suppose that they are imposed on the world by God. The other would be to suppose that they reflect the presence of laws of nature, conceived of as forms of natural necessity. But the only way of making sense of the notion of a law of nature, thus conceived, (...)
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  • Carl S. Helrich (2009). Cosmic Impressions: Traces of God in the Laws of Nature. By Walter Thirring. Zygon 44 (4):997-999.
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  • Boris Kment (2006). Counterfactuals and Explanation. Mind 115 (458).
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  • S. Korner (1953). On Laws of Nature. Mind 62 (246).
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  • S. Körner (1953). On Laws of Nature. Mind 62 (246):216-229.
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  • James Kreines (2009). Kant on the Laws of Nature: Laws, Necessitation, and the Limitation of Our Knowledge. European Journal of Philosophy 17 (4):527-558.
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  • Marc Lange (2008). Could the Laws of Nature Change? Philosophy of Science 75 (1).
    After reviewing several failed arguments that laws cannot change, I use the laws' special relation to counterfactuals to show how temporary laws would have to differ from eternal but time-dependent laws. Then I argue that temporary laws are impossible and that neither Lewis's nor Armstrong's analyses of law nicely accounts for the laws' immutability. *Received September 2006; revised September 2007. ‡Many thanks to John Roberts and John Carroll for valuable comments on earlier drafts, as well as to several anonymous referees (...)
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  • Marc Lange (2005). Laws and Their Stability. Synthese 144 (3):415Ð432.
    Many philosophers have believed that the laws of nature differ from the accidental truths in their invariance under counterfactual perturbations. Roughly speaking, the laws would still have held had q been the case, for any q that is consistent with the laws. (Trivially, no accident would still have held under every such counterfactual supposition.) The main problem with this slogan (even if it is true) is that it uses the laws themselves to delimit qs range. I present a means of (...)
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  • Marc Lange (2004). A Note on Scientific Essentialism, Laws of Nature, and Counterfactual Conditionals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (2):227 – 241.
    Scientific essentialism aims to account for the natural laws' special capacity to support counterfactuals. I argue that scientific essentialism can do so only by resorting to devices that are just as ad hoc as those that essentialists accuse Humean regularity theories of employing. I conclude by offering an account of the laws' distinctive relation to counterfactuals that portrays laws as contingent but nevertheless distinct from accidents by virtue of possessing a genuine variety of necessity.
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  • Marc Lange (1999). Why Are the Laws of Nature so Important to Science? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3):625-652.
    Why should science be so interested in discovering whether p is a law over and above whether p is true? The answer may involve the laws' relation to counterfactuals: p is a law iff p would still have obtained under any counterfactual supposition that is consistent with the laws. But unless we already understand why science is especially concerned with the laws, we cannot explain why science is especially interested in what would have happened under those counterfactual suppositions consistent with (...)
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  • Marc Lange (1996). Laws of Nature, Cosmic Coincidences and Scientific Realism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4):614 – 638.
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  • Marc Lange (1996). Inductive Confirmation, Counterfactual Conditionals, and Laws of Nature. Philosophical Studies 85 (1).
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  • Robert A. Larmer (2008). Miracles, Physicalism, and the Laws of Nature. Religious Studies 44 (2):149-159.
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  • Chuang Liu, Laws and Models in a Theory of Idealization.
    In this paper, I first give a brief summary of a critique of the traditional theories of approximation and idealization; and after identifying one of the major roles of idealization as detaching component processes or systems from joints of nature, a detailed analysis is given of idealized laws -- which are discoverable and/or applicable -- in such processes and systems (i.e. idealized model systems). Then, arguments are given for the inclusion of dispositional properties in the class of admissible properties for (...)
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  • T. J. Mawson (2001). Miracles and Laws of Nature. Religious Studies 37 (1):33-58.
    In this paper, I argue that miracles should not be defined as involving violations of natural laws. They should be defined as signs of particular volitions of the deity or of other supernatural agents. I suggest that one may, without any prior belief in the existence of such supernatural agents, reasonably come to believe that one has witnessed miracles.
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  • Ave Mets & Piret Kuusk (2009). The Constructive Realist Account of Science and its Application to Ilya Prigogine's Conception of Laws of Nature. Foundations of Science 14 (3).
    Sciences are often regarded as providing the best, or, ideally, exact, knowledge of the world, especially in providing laws of nature. Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of non-equilibrium chemical processes—this being also an important attempt to bridge the gap between exact and non-exact sciences [mentioned in the Presentation Speech by Professor Stig Claesson (nobelprize.org, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977)]—has had this ideal in mind when trying to formulate a new kind of science. Philosophers (...)
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  • Jon Miller, Spinoza and the Concept of a Law of Nature.
    In the early modern period, laws of nature underwent two re markable changes: first, their role in science and philosophy was greatly expanded as they became central to investigation and explanation; and second, ontology (are the laws “real” or not?) and induction emerged as far and away the most important problems of interpretation. The dramatic expansion in the variety of the laws and their range of application, together with the emergence of ontology and induction as (the) paramount problems of interpretation, (...)
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  • Sandra D. Mitchell (2000). Dimensions of Scientific Law. Philosophy of Science 67 (2):242-265.
    Biological knowledge does not fit the image of science that philosophers have developed. Many argue that biology has no laws. Here I criticize standard normative accounts of law and defend an alternative, pragmatic approach. I argue that a multidimensional conceptual framework should replace the standard dichotomous law/accident distinction in order to display important differences in the kinds of causal structure found in nature and the corresponding scientific representations of those structures. To this end I explore the dimensions of stability, strength, (...)
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  • Sandra D. Mitchell (1997). Pragmatic Laws. Philosophy of Science 64 (4):479.
    Beatty, Brandon, and Sober agree that biological generalizations, when contingent, do not qualify as laws. Their conclusion follows from a normative definition of law inherited from the Logical Empiricists. I suggest two additional approaches: paradigmatic and pragmatic. Only the pragmatic represents varying kinds and degrees of contingency and exposes the multiple relationships found among scientific generalizations. It emphasizes the function of laws in grounding expectation and promotes the evaluation of generalizations along continua of ontological and representational parameters. Stability of conditions (...)
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  • Stathos Psillos (2002). Causation and Explanation. Acumen.
    This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.
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  • A. G. Ramsperger (1937). Logic and the Laws of Nature. Journal of Philosophy 34 (14):373-380.
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  • John T. Roberts (2008). The Law-Governed Universe. Oxford University Press.
    The law-governed world-picture -- A remarkable idea about the way the universe is cosmos and compulsion -- The laws as the cosmic order : the best-system approach -- The three ways : no-laws, non-governing-laws, governing-laws -- Work that laws do in science -- An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order -- The picture in four theses -- The strategy of this book -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The measurability approach to laws -- What (...)
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  • John T. Roberts (2005). Measurability and Physical Laws. Synthese 144 (3):433Ð447.
    I propose and motivate a new account of fundamental physical laws, the Measurability Account of Laws (MAL). This account has a distinctive logical form, in that it takes the primary nomological concept to be that of a law relative to a given theory, and defines a law simpliciter as a law relative to some true theory. What makes a proposition a law relative to a theory is that it plays an indispensable role in demonstrating that some quantity posited by that (...)
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  • Wesley C. Salmon (1977). Laws, Modalities and Counterfactuals. Synthese 35 (2):191-229.
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  • Markus Schrenk (2004). Galileo Vs Aristotle on Free Falling Bodies. Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 7 (1).
    This essay attempts to demonstrate that it is doubtful if Galileo's famous thought experiment concerning falling bodies in his 'Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences' (Galileo 1954: 61-64) actually does succeed in proving that Aristotle was wrong in claiming that "bodies of different weight […] move […] with different speeds which stand to one another in the same ratio as their weights," (Galileo 1954: 61). (Part I); and further that it is likewise doubtful that that argument does or even can establish (...)
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  • Peter Smith, Laws of Nature.
    Where to begin? I’ll take three books from my shelves. First, now nearly forty years old, a little book of television lectures by the great physicist Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. He talks about the laws of motion, the inverse square law of gravitation, conservation laws, symmetry principles and the various ways these all hang together. Feynman obviously takes it that it is a prime aim of science to discover such laws. But what are laws? He writes – (...)
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  • Norman Swartz, Laws of Nature. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • R. G. Swinburne (1968). Miracles. Philosophical Quarterly 18 (73):320-328.
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  • Ian Thompson, The Consistency of Physical Law with Divine Immanence.
    A model is presented to show how the existence of physical law could be a reasonable consequence of Divine Immanence in the world of natural phenomena. Divine Immanence is seen as the continual production of the principal causes or dispositions which enable created things to act and change. It is argued that this model is physically consistent, philosophically coherent, and theologically sound.
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  • Peter Vallentyne, “The Nomic Role Account of Carving Reality at the Joints”, Synthese 115 (1998): 171-198.
    Natural properties are those that carve reality at the joints. The notion of carving reality at the joints, however, is somewhat obscure. It is sometimes understood in terms of making for similarity, sometimes in terms of conferring causal powers, and sometimes in terms of figuring in the laws of nature. I develop and assess an account of the third sort according to which carving reality at the joints is understood as having the right level of determinacy relative to nomic roles. (...)
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  • Peter Vallentyne (1998). The Nomic Role Account of Carving Reality at the Joints. Synthese 115 (2).
    Natural properties are those that carve reality at the joints. The notion of carving reality at the joints, however, is somewhat obscure, and is often understood in terms of making for similarity, conferring causal powers, or figuring in the laws of nature. I develop and assess an account of the third sort according to which carving reality at the joints is understood as having the right level of determinacy relative to nomic roles. The account has the attraction of involving very (...)
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  • Review author[s]: Bas C. van Fraassen (1993). Armstrong, Cartwright, and Earman on Laws and Symmetry. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (2):431-444.
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  • Peter van Inwagen (1979). Laws and Counterfactuals. Noûs 13 (4):439-453.
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