Natural laws and the problem of provisos
Erkenntnis 38 (2):233Ð248 (1993)
| Abstract | Hempel and Giere contend that the existence of provisos poses grave difficulties for any regularity account of physical law. However, Hempel and Giere rely upon a mistaken conception of the way in which statements acquire their content. By correcting this mistake, I remove the problem Hempel and Giere identify but reveal a different problem that provisos pose for a regularity account — indeed, for any account of physical law according to which the state of affairs described by a law-statement presupposes a Humean regularity. These considerations suggest a normative analysis of law-statements. On this view, law-statements are not distinguished from accidental generalizations by the kind of Humean regularities they describe because a law-statement need not describe any Humean regularity. Rather, a law-statement says that in certain contexts, one ought to regard the assertion of a given type of claim, if made with justification, as a proper way to justify a claim of a certain other kind. | |||||||||
| 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: 5,875 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesLuís Duarte D.’Almeida (2011). Legal Statements and Normative Language. Law and Philosophy 30 (2):167-199.
Predrag Šustar (2005). Nomological and Transcendental Criteria for Scientific Laws. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 5 (3):533-544.
Norman Swartz (1985). The Concept of Physical Law. Cambridge University Press.
Thomas Nickles (1971). Covering Law Explanation. Philosophy of Science 38 (4):542-561.
Carl Gustav Hempel (1988). Provisos: A Philosophical Problem Concerning the Inferential Function of Scientific Laws. In A. Grünbaum & W. Salmon (eds.), The Limits of Deductivism. University of California Press, Berkeley, Ca.
Alexander Bird (2008). The Epistemological Argument Against Lewis's Regularity View of Laws. Philosophical Studies 138 (1):73–89.
Alexander Bird (2002). Laws and Criteria. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (4):511-42.
Mariam Thalos (1999). In Favor of Being Only Humean. Philosophical Studies 93 (3):265-298.
Christopher H. Eliot (2011). Hempel's Provisos and Ceteris Paribus Clauses. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 42 (2):207-218.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads33 ( #37,203 of 556,837 )Recent downloads (6 months)6 ( #13,107 of 556,837 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
