Summary
Summary Ayer - Laws of Nature
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- Oxford University (OX)
Notes on AJ Ayer's text, 'What is a Law of Nature?'
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By: emmajones • 6 year ago
By: manish118 • 7 year ago
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A.J. Ayer - What is a Law of Nature?● What does ‘law’ mean in this context?
○ Not imperative (though Hobbes included imperatives in his laws of
nature)
○ Rather the commands issued by nature are so powerful that they cannot
be disobeyed
○ To disobey the commands would represent a contravention of the
laws of logic (??)
● To think of the laws of nature in this way may suggest some form of logical necessity or
necessary relation between events. This could lead us to the belief that the laws of nature can be
discovered a priori.
○ Hume refutes this suggestion by claiming there is no intrinsic relation
between cause and effect, thus we can only understand the ‘laws’ of nature through
experience
○ But what if Hume is wrong? If we examine statements/laws of the form
‘All Xs are Y’ then when we come to accept the law we change our understanding of X.
It was discovered that loadstones attract iron and steel, now it is accepted that all
loadstones attract iron and steel, and this is an ‘analytic truth’
● If we accept this reasoning, we may conclude that some laws of nature are analytically
true, whereas some are not. But if the ultimate goal of physics (and maybe even biology, social
sciences) is a unified theory in which everything is axiomatized, then surely all generalizations
would be logically necessary.
○ the problem with this understanding of the laws of nature is that it the
tighter it is logically, the more sterile it would be and the harder empirical applications
would become. Conversely, the more easily applicable it is, the looser it would have to
be logically (i.e. fewer analytic truths)
■ the more we put into our definitions, the more uncertain
it becomes when anything satisfies them e.g. if we say hydrogen has
303,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules then we restrict what we can call
hydrogen
○ We may claim that it is a property of ‘laws of nature’ that they are not
analytically true; hence such an axiomatic system of science would be qualitatively
different to current science
○ Thus to object to Hume that cause and effect are necessarily distinct is
simply to say that there may be necessary, axiomatic systems that can take the place of
natural laws. But science is generally far from here today, and certainly was in Hume’s
day
○ In any case, Hume is right in saying that the relations between things,
events and properties cannot both be factual and logical. We cannot describe
empirical laws of nature as logically necessary.
● Having rid the confusion between logical and factual relations the ‘obvious course is to
hold that a proposition expresses a law of nature when it states what invariably happens’
○ there is not, has never been, and will never be exceptions. Thus
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