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General Philosophy of Science > Laws of Nature > Theories of Laws of Nature > Subjunctive Stability Theories of Laws
Subjunctive Stability Theories of Laws
Edited by Markus Schrenk (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Assistant editor: Daian Bica (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
About this topic
| Summary | Laws of nature are said to support counterfactuals. If I were to drop my cup of coffee, it would fall on the floor because (at least partially) of the law of gravitation (i.e., masses attract each other with the inverse square of their distance). By comparison, some random accidental truths cannot support corresponding counterfactuals. Hence, there seems to be prima facie some sort of explanatory interplay between laws and their supporting role in counterfactual reasoning. However, in the stability theory account of laws (developed independently by Lange, Woodward, and Roberts) the usual explanatory direction is turned on its head: a regularity is a law of nature in virtue of being stable (modally hyperresilient) under all (eligible) counterfactual circumstances. Within Lange’s subjunctive stability theory, the counterfactual stability is grounding both the presumed nomicity and necessity of the laws (and not vice-versa). In Woodwards version the modal, counterfactual stability is further grounded in the capacities and dispositions manifested by particular systems. |
| Key works | For Lange’s version of stability theory see Lange 2005, Lange 2009 and in Roberts 2013. For other interventionist formulations of the stability theory see Woodward 1992. |
| Introductions | Schrenk 2014, Jaag & Schrenk 2020, ch. 2.5. |
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- Necessities Overboard: A Reply to Lange.Harjit Bhogal - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.In this discussion note I reply to some criticisms that Marc Lange (2022) has directed at my Humean view of scientific laws (Bhogal, 2020) -- about whether Humean views can make sense of the apparent fact that laws are counterfactually invariant. The key idea of my response is that the Humean should think of their reduction of the laws to the Humean mosaic as closely related to other views where we reduce one domain to another but still allow that the (...)
- The Necessity of Accidents.Chris Dorst & Marc Lange - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.We argue that if there are laws of nature, then there must also be accidents. If the “laws” in a world suffice to determine the world’s entire history, then these “laws” cannot play various central roles characteristic of laws, and thus (we conclude) they are not laws at all. Many proposed accounts of lawhood (primitivist accounts, universals accounts, the Best System Account, the Package Deal Account, essentialist accounts) inappropriately permit worlds with laws but no accidents. We identify two otherwise dissimilar (...)
- Explanations by Constraint: Not Just in Physics.Marc Lange - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (4):265-277.Several philosophers have argued that ‘constraints’ constrain (and thereby explain) by virtue of being modally stronger than ordinary laws of nature. In this way, a constraint applies to all possible systems, for a variety of possibility that is broader (that is, more inclusive) than the variety we employ when we say that the ordinary laws of nature apply to all physically possible systems. Explanations by constraint are thus more broadly unifying than ordinary causal explanations. Philosophical examples of good candidates for (...)
- Laws of nature, natural necessity, and counterfactual conditionals.Marc Lange - 2018 - In Otávio Bueno & Scott A. Shalkowski (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Modality. New York: Routledge.Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Do Counterfactuals Ground the Laws of Nature? A Critique of Lange.Heather Demarest - 2012 - Philosophy of Science 79 (3):333-344.Most philosophers of science hold that the laws of nature play an important role in determining which counterfactuals are true. Marc Lange reverses this dependence, arguing that it is the truth of certain counterfactuals that determines which statements are laws. I argue that the context sensitivity of counterfactual sentences makes it impossible for them to determine the laws. Next, I argue that Lange’s view cannot avoid additional counterexamples concerning nested counterfactuals. Finally, I argue that Lange’s counterfacts, posited as the ultimate (...)
- Marc Lange: Laws and Lawmakers; Science, Metaphysics and the Laws of Nature.Robert Nola - 2012 - Science & Education 21 (2):271-277.
- Lange and laws, kinds, and counterfactuals.Alexander Bird - 2011 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.In this paper I examine and question Marc Lange’s account of laws, and his claim that the law delineating the range of natural kinds of fundamental particle has a lesser grade of necessity that the laws connecting the fundamental properties of those kinds with their derived properties.
- Laws and lawmakers: Science, metaphysics and the laws of nature * by Marc Lange.A. Drewery - 2011 - Analysis 71 (3):599-601.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 (...)
- Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature – Marc Lange.Alexander Reutlinger - 2011 - Philosophical Quarterly 61 (243):415-418.
- Counterfactuals all the way down?: Marc Lange: Laws and lawmakers: Science, metaphysics, and the laws of nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 280 pp, $99 HB, $24.95 PB.Jim Woodward, Barry Loewer, John W. Carroll & Marc Lange - 2011 - Metascience 20 (1):27-52.Counterfactuals all the way down? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9437-9 Authors Jim Woodward, History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Barry Loewer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA John W. Carroll, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB#3125—Caldwell Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA Journal Metascience Online (...)
- Marc Lange. Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature.Christopher Belanger - 2010 - Spontaneous Generations 4 (1):266-269.In Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature, Marc Lange has presented an engagingly written, tightly argued, and novel philosophical account of the laws of nature. One of the intuitions behind the notion of a law of nature is, roughly, that of the many regularities we observe in the world there are some which appear to be due to mere happen-stance (“accidental” regularities, in the philosopher’s jargon), while others, which we call “laws,” seem to be possessed of (...)
- Dispositions and subjunctives.Jesse R. Steinberg - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (3):323 - 341.It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called “masked dispositions” and “finkish dispositions”). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to Φ when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would Φ ceteris paribus . I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised (...)
- Laws and Lawmakers Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature.Marc Lange - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.Laws form counterfactually stable sets -- Natural necessity -- Three payoffs of my account -- A world of subjunctives.
- Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds.Matthew H. Slater & Chris Haufe - 2009 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (3):265-276.Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non-nomic matters of fact? Lange's criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of (...)
- Could the laws of nature change?Marc Lange - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (1):69-92.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 (...)
- (1 other version)Laws and Meta-Laws of Nature.Marc Lange - 2007 - The Harvard Review of Philosophy 15 (1):21-36.
- How to account for the relation between chancy facts and deterministic laws.Marc Lange - 2006 - Mind 115 (460):917--946.Suppose that unobtanium-346 is a rare radioactive isotope. Consider: (1) Every Un346 atom, at its creation, decays within 7 microseconds (µs). (50%) Every Un346 atom, at its creation, has a 50% chance of decaying within 7µs. (1) and (50%) can be true together, but (1) and (50%) cannot together be laws of nature. Indeed, (50%)'s mere (non-vacuous) truth logically precludes (1)'s lawhood. A satisfactory analysis of chance and lawhood should nicely account for this relation. I shall argue first that David (...)
- (1 other version)Natural Laws in Scientific Practice.John W. Carroll - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1):240-245.This is a review of Marc Lange's _Natural Laws in Scientific Practice<D>.
- Lange on essentialism, counterfactuals, and explanation.Toby Handfield - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (1):81 – 85.Marc Lange objects to scientific essentialists that they can give no better account of the counterfactual invariance of laws than Humeans. While conceding this point succeeds ad hominem against some essentialists, I show that it does not undermine essentialism in general. Moreover, Lange's alternative account of the relation between laws and counterfactuals is - with minor modification - compatible with essentialism.
- Laws and their stability.Marc Lange - 2005 - 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 (...)
- Marc Lange: Natural Laws in Scientific Practice. [REVIEW]Joshua Alexander - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (2):222-224.What is a law of nature? Traditionally, philosophical discussion of this question has been dominated by two prominent alternatives; David Lewis’s best-systems analysis, according to which a law is a regularity that serves as a theorem in our best axiomatization of the facts about the world, and the Dretske-Armstrong-Tooley analysis, which incorporates universals to distinguish laws from mere accidental generalizations. Marc Lange’s first book presents a provocative alternative to this tradition, providing a novel treatment of natural laws that should be (...)
- A note on scientific essentialism, laws of nature, and counterfactual conditionals.Marc Lange - 2004 - 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.
- Natural Laws in Scientific Practice. By Marc Lange. [REVIEW]C. Hoeckley - 2003 - The European Legacy 8 (2):237-237.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Marc Lange, Natural Laws in Scientific Practice. [REVIEW]L. Jaeger - 2003 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17 (3):313-314.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Who’s Afraid of C eteris-Paribus Laws? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Them.Marc Lange - 2002 - Erkenntnis 57 (3):407-423.Ceteris-paribus clauses are nothing to worry about; aceteris-paribus qualifier is not poisonously indeterminate in meaning. Ceteris-paribus laws teach us that a law need not be associated straightforwardly with a regularity in the manner demanded by regularity analyses of law and analyses of laws as relations among universals. This lesson enables us to understand the sense in which the laws of nature would have been no different under various counterfactual suppositions — a feature even of those laws that involve no ceteris-paribus (...)
- (1 other version)Lange, Marc. Natural Laws in Scientific Practice. [REVIEW]Kent Staley - 2002 - Review of Metaphysics 56 (2):435-436.
- Natural laws in scientific practice.Marc Lange - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.It is often presumed that the laws of nature have special significance for scientific reasoning. But the laws' distinctive roles have proven notoriously difficult to identify--leading some philosophers to question if they hold such roles at all. This study offers original accounts of the roles that natural laws play in connection with counterfactual conditionals, inductive projections, and scientific explanations, and of what the laws must be in order for them to be capable of playing these roles. Particular attention is given (...)
- Why are the laws of nature so important to science?Marc Lange - 1999 - 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 (...)
- Laws, counterfactuals, stability, and degrees of lawhood.Marc Lange - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (2):243-267.I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not "broader"--at least in the most straightforward sense.) The stability distinctive of the laws is used to explicate what it would mean for there (...)
- Inductive confirmation, counterfactual conditionals, and laws of nature.Marc Lange - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 85 (1):1-36.
- When Would Natural Laws Have Been Broken?Marc Lange - 1993 - Analysis 53 (4):262-269.
- The Design of Scientific Practice: A Study of Physical Laws and Inductive Reasoning.Marc Barrett Lange - 1990 - Dissertation, University of PittsburghThe expression of a physical law has usually been understood as a description. Among the entities that different philosophers have maintained that nomic expressions describe are regularities among events or states of affairs, natural necessities, and relations among universals. I maintain that nomic expressions are better understood not as serving a descriptive function but as in many respects playing a prescriptive role; the expression of a physical law, I argue, says that one ought to regard certain claims as able to (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
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