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 (...) for their good suggestions. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, CB #3125, Caldwell Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that ‘scientific law’ is one of the key scientific terms which any adequate philosophy of science must attempt to clarify or define. The importance of the concept ‘law’ is made evident by the fact that the distinctive functions of science—explanation and prediction—are usually analyzed with reference to laws. Thus events are explained by showing that descriptions of them are deducible from laws, and laws are utilized in deducing descriptions of unknown future events, thereby permitting their prediction. (...) Moreover, it has recently become clear that the concept ‘law’ is relevant to the analysis of counterfactual conditionals, disposition terms, and the physical modalities. An adequate explication of ‘law’, then, will further the analysis of these important concepts. (shrink)

Special issue: "Reflecting on the Legacy of C.I. Lewis: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Modal Logic".

Para refutar los estigmas de subjetivismo e incapacidad de generalización de la investigación cualitativa, se presentan los principales rasgos de una teoría del dato y de una teoría de la producción de universales empíricos que cuestionan los fundamentos en que se basó esa crítica. Al mismo tiempo, ..