Summary
Summary Bird - Laws of Nature
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- Oxford University (OX)
Notes on Alexander Bird's 'Philosophy of Science'. Chapter on 'Laws of Nature'
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Alexander Bird - Philosophy of ScienceChapter 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?
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