Laws and Lawmakers Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 22 October 2009
- ISBN 9780195328134
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages280 pages
- Size 211x140x20 mm
- Weight 408 g
- Language English 0
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Short description:
What distinguishes laws of nature from ordinary facts? What are the "lawmakers": the facts in virtue of which the laws are laws? How can laws be necessary, yet contingent? Lange provocatively argues that laws are distinguished by their necessity, which is grounded in primitive subjunctive facts, while also providing a non-technical and accessible survey of the field.
MoreLong description:
Laws of nature have long puzzled philosophers. What distinguishes laws from facts about the world that do not rise to the level of laws? How can laws be contingent and nevertheless necessary? In this brief, accessible study, Lange offers provocative and original answers to these questions. He argues that laws are distinguished by their necessity, which is grounded in primitive subjunctive facts (expressed by counterfactual conditionals). While recognizing that natural necessity is distinct from logical, metaphysical, and mathematical necessity, Lange explains how natural necessity constitutes a species of the same genus as those other varieties of necessity.
Along the way, Lange discusses the relation between laws and objective chances, as well as such unjustly neglected topics as the completeness of the laws of physics and whether the laws of nature can change. Lange's elegant, engagingly written book is non-technical and suitable for undergraduate philosophers (and undergraduate scientists interested in the logical foundations of science). It is "must reading" for metaphysicians and philosophers of science working on laws, chance, counterfactuals, modality, or the philosophy of physics.
Marc Lange takes a refreshingly open-minded and original approach to laws of nature... highly recommended to all philosophers of science who are interested in laws of nature and neighbouring topics. Reading Lange's book will certainly pay off as a serious and carefully argued challenge to many received opinions on laws of nature.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1: Laws Form Counterfactually Stable Sets
Welcome
Their necessity sets the laws apart
The laws's persistence under counterfactuals
Nomic preservation
Beyond nomic preservation
A host of related problems: triviality, circularity, arbitrariness
Sub-nomic stability
No nonmaximal set containing accidents possesses sub-nomic stability
How two sub-nomically stable sets must be related: multiple strata of natural laws
Why the laws would still have been laws
Conclusion: laws form stable sets
Chapter 2: Natural Necessity
What it would take to understand natural necessity
The Euthyphro question
David Lewis's "Best-System Account"
Lewis's account and the laws's supervenience
The Euthyphro question returns
Are all relative necessities created equal?
The modality principle
A proposal for distinguishing genuine from merely relative modalities
Borrowing a strategy from Chapter 1
Necessity as maximal invariance
The laws form a system
Scientific essentialism squashes the pyramid
Why there is a natural ordering of the genuine modalities
Why there is a natural ordering of the genuine modalities
Chapter 3: Three Payoffs of My Account
The itinerary
Could the laws of nature change?
Why the laws are immutable
Symmetry principles as meta-laws
The symmetry meta-laws form a nomically stable set
The relation between chancy facts and deterministic laws
How to account for the relation
Chapter 4: A World of Subjunctives
What if the lawmakers were subjunctive facts?
The lawmakers's regress
Stability
Avoiding adhocery
Instantaneous rates of change and the causal explanation problem
Et in Arcadia ego
The rule of law
Why the laws must be complete
Envoi: Am I cheating?
