Laws and lawmakers: Science, metaphysics and the laws of nature * by Marc Lange
Analysis 71 (3):599-601 (2011)
| Abstract | 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 … | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,672 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesMarc Lange (1999). Why Are the Laws of Nature so Important to Science? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3):625-652.
Marc Lange (2009). Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature. Oxford University Press.
Barry Ward (2012). Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature. [REVIEW] Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B 43 (2):155-158.
Marc Lange (2005). Laws and Their Stability. Synthese 144 (3):415Ð432.
Marc Lange (2002). Who's Afraid of Ceteris-Paribus Laws? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Them. Erkenntnis 57 (3):281Ð301.
Christopher Belanger (2010). Marc Lange. Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature. Spontaneous Generations 4 (1).
Alexander Reutlinger (2011). Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature – Marc Lange. Philosophical Quarterly 61 (243):415-418.
Marc Lange (2000). Natural Laws in Scientific Practice. Oxford University Press.
Mark Lance & Maggie Little (2010). Lange, Marc . Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 . Pp. 280. $99.00 (Cloth); $24.95 (Paper). [REVIEW] Ethics 120 (2):431-437.
Heather Demarest (2012). Do Counterfactuals Ground the Laws of Nature? A Critique of Lange. Philosophy of Science 79 (3):333-344.
Marc Lange (1999). Laws, Counterfactuals, Stability, and Degrees of Lawhood. Philosophy of Science 66 (2):243-267.
Z. Yudell (2013). Lange's Challenge: Accounting for Meta-Laws. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (2):347-369.
Marc Lange (2004). A Note on Scientific Essentialism, Laws of Nature, and Counterfactual Conditionals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (2):227 – 241.
Marc Lange (2007). Laws and Meta-Laws of Nature: Conservation Laws and Symmetries. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38 (3):457-481.
Alexander Bird (2011). Lange and Laws, Kinds, and Counterfactuals. In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving Nature at its Joints. MIT Press.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2011-05-28Total downloads44 ( #25,319 of 549,065 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,185 of 549,065 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
