Laws Are Persistent Inductives Schemes

In F. Stadler (ed.), Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 11--135 (2004)
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Abstract

The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of formalizing defeasible reasoning or inductive schemes seems ideally suited to explicate the idea in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it will turn out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables. This entails that de Finetti‘s representation theorems can be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of laws thus conceived.

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References found in this work

General Propositions and Causality.Frank Plumpton Ramsey - 1929 - In The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. pp. 237-255.
La Prévision: Ses Lois Logiques, Ses Sources Subjectives.Bruno de Finetti - 1937 - Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré 7 (1):1-68.

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