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PPE Notes The Philosophy of Science and Social Science Notes

Alexander Bird Laws Of Nature Notes

Updated Alexander Bird Laws Of Nature Notes

The Philosophy of Science and Social Science Notes

The Philosophy of Science and Social Science

Approximately 88 pages

Notes on various texts and debates in the philosophy of science and philosophy of social science, including explanation, relativism, interpretation, and individual/holism....

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Alexander Bird - Philosophy of Science

Chapter One: Laws of Nature

  • Aims of science including explaining, categorizing, detecting causes, measuring and predicting all rely upon ‘the existence of laws’

    • separate claim: these aims also rely upon the concept, theory of a law

  • Laws of nature are things in the world which we try to discover - they are separate from our theories or statements of laws

Minimalism about laws - the simple regularity theory

  • Laws are just regularities

    • laws are nothing more than the collection of their instances

    • this is an expression of empiricism - concepts should be explicable in terms of our experiences

  • Simple regularity theory (SRT): it is a law that Fs are Gs if and only if all Fs are Gs

    • but this is neither a sufficient nor a necessary account of laws - there are regularities that are not laws and laws that are not regularities

Regularities that are not laws

  • There are many regularities that are accidental, not law-like

    • e.g. ‘All persisting lumps of pure gold-195 have a mass less that 1000kg’ is contingent

    • whereas ‘All persisting lumps of pure uranium-235 have a mass of less than 1000kg’ is not contingent, it is a law of chemistry

      • SRT cannot distinguish between genuine laws and mere coincidences

  • We can create a contrived example e.g. describe Jane perfectly (such that only she fits the description) and then claim that all people matching that description play the oboe

    • retort of the SRT minimalist:

      • is it right to bundle a collection of properties together as one property?

        • well, this is done by some things that we consider laws e.g. gas laws relate the pressure of a gas to the compound of its temperature and volume

      • can one instance be regarded as a regularity?

        • and there are presumably laws that cover e.g. the Big Bang, for which it is the only instance, or else the properties of transuranium elements with very short half lives, for which there is not observable regularity at all

  • Another problem for the SRT minimalist: how to account for laws without instances

    • the statement ‘All Fs are Gs’, if there are no Fs, is trivially true (according to logic)

      • so how are we to distinguish the trivially true regularities that are laws from the trivially true regularities that aren’t

        • we can’t, using SRT anyway

  • Another problem for the SRT minimalist: how do we account for functional regularities?

    • where a law refers to a continuum - e.g. the pressure of a gas, there are infinitely many points on the continuum, so such a law cannot be modelled on observed regularities- there will inevitable be gaps

      • hence if we are to model such a law, we need to go beyond observed instances

Laws and counterfactuals

  • Laws support counterfactuals - what would have happened in a possible but not actual situation

  • On the SRT model, every empty regularity is true. That means that ‘All Fs are Gs’ and ‘All Fs are not Gs’ are both true, where there are no Fs

    • but with a counterfactuals show that this is a problem - if there had been an F, then it would have been either G or not-G, but not both

      • hence counterfactual analysis shows that the two empty regularities cannot both be laws

      • same for two distinct functional laws that give the same results only for the observed instances

  • Counterfactuals also allow us to distinguish between nomic and accidental regularities

    • where a regularity is accidental, we can imagine a circumstance in which an F would have been not-G, but not so where a regularity is nomic

  • The fact that laws support counterfactuals is not on its own enough to show the minimalist to be wrong

    • this is believed because counterfactuals allow us to go beyond actual instances, and towards what would have happened in possible but non-actual circumstances

      • the problem here is that counterfactuals imply a ceteris paribus clause, which must include the laws of nature staying the same

        • so, because counterfactuals implicitly refer to laws, counterfactuals cannot help us in the analysis of laws

        • laws support counterfactuals only insofar as counterfactuals refer to laws - where a counterfactual does not keep constant the laws of nature, then laws do not support it

          • e.g. ‘how fast would things have accelerated had the gravitational constant been twice what it is’ is a counterfactual not supported by laws of gravitation

Laws that are not regularities - probabilistic laws

  • Regularities that are not laws:

    • accidental regularities

    • contrived regularities

    • uninstantianted trivial regularities

    • competing functional regularities

    • the response of the minimalist is usually to add conditions to reduce the range of regularities

      • but what if regularities are not even necessary? i.e. there are laws which are not regularities

  • Imagine a probabilistic law which says that nuclei of a certain kind have a probability p of decaying within time t

    • for the minimalist, this law is equivalent to the fact that of all the relevant particles, a certain proportion will have decayed within time t

      • but if we consider each individual particle, each has a probability p of decaying in time t. this means that the law is consistent with every particle (i.e. the whole nucleus) decaying after time t

        • this is a problem for the minimalist because the law is equivalent to its instances, and here is a radical divergence between the law and its instances

        • BUT this argument commits the fallacy of assuming that what is possible for any individual particle is possible for a collection of particles

          • this argument is only valid if there is a logical gap between a law and its instances, which is precisely what the minimalist denies

            • hence it begs the questions against the minimalist

The systematic account of laws of nature

  • So, if we consider the argument that regularities are an unnecessary feature of laws to be invalid, then perhaps the minimalist...

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