Chapter 3 of the book The software of the Universe: The Reducibility of the Laws of Nature The Conceptual Geography of the Notion of Law of Nature (original) (raw)

Philosophical discussions of the notion of the law of nature often spring from the attempt to identify a few necessary conditions that the notion must satisfy a priori: predictive power, universality, necessity, truth, or the satisfaction of counterfactual conditionals. 1 This manner of posing the question, however, leads to the development of theories of the laws of nature which physicists, biologists, or economists cannot recognize, simply because they do not reflect their practices in a sufficiently faithful manner. In critically presenting and evaluating the three most important philosophical positions on the laws of nature, regularism, necessitarism, and instrumentalist skepticism 2 , we must therefore keep a requisite in mind which we can refer to as being of ―faithfulness‖ to the practice, the contents, and to the overarching ends of science, i.e., the only requisite which should be presupposed by any epistemological analysis of the concept of law. Naturally, the decision to follow this method as the North Star of our investigation does not imply the recognition of a controversy as to what the end of scientific research is, what concrete use scientists make of the notion of law, or what a scientific theory is. Nor does it imply the adoption of a passive and conservative philosophical attitude with respect to the opinions that scientists implicitly defend on the laws of nature; as is obvious, the philosophy of science that they tacitly utilize is not at all homogeneous, unambiguous, and consistent. In selecting conceptions of the laws of nature implicit in the practice of scientists, and which better respond to a complete vision of the purposes of science and of its cognitive possibilities, we should obviously keep in mind some explicit philosophical reflections that are available today. In short, we should steer away from excessive philosophical timidity – and therefore unjustified 1 A counterfactual conditional is a conditional statement like, ―if p were true, then q would also be true,‖ in which the antecedent describes a situation that is contrary to fact. 2 In essence, as we will see in the next chapter, regularists hold that laws express regular associations of types of events holding everywhere in space-time; necessitarists hold that laws are necessary relations among properties regarded as universals, and instrumentalists hold that laws are simple instruments for prediction, devoid of any truth-value.