Armstrong and van Fraassen on Probabilistic Laws of Nature

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Maclean
Keyword(s):  
Half Life ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Bas Van Fraassen ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
David Armstrong ◽  
Causal Laws

In What is a Law of Nature? (1983) David Armstrong promotes a theory of laws according to which laws of nature are contingent relations of necessitation between universals. The metaphysics Armstrong develops uses deterministic causal laws as paradigmatic cases of laws, but he thinks his metaphysics explicates other sorts of laws too, including probabilistic laws, like that of the half-life of radium being 1602 years. Bas van Fraassen (1987) gives seven arguments for why Armstrong's theory of laws is incapable of explicating probabilistic laws. The main thrust of the arguments is that Armstrong's metaphysical apparatus serves to drive up the initial probability values stated by probabilistic laws. Armstrong replies to van Fraassen in his (1988) and (1997) by appealing to limiting relative frequencies. Remarkably little has since been written about Armstrong's theory of probabilistic laws and I wish to revive interest in the debate here by assessing Armstrong's response. I will argue that his response fails because the principle of instantiation puts the limiting relative frequencies that he requires out of reach.

Laws of Nature

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Universe

The concept of a law of nature, while familiar, is deeply puzzling. Theorists such as Descartes think a divine being governs the universe according to the laws which follow from that being’s own nature. Newton detaches the concept from theology and is agnostic about the ontology underlying the laws of nature. Some later philosophers treat laws as summaries of events or tools for understanding and explanation, or identify the laws with principles and equations fundamental to scientific theories. In the first part of this volume, essays from leading historians of philosophy identify central questions: are laws independent of the things they govern, or do they emanate from the powers of bodies? Are the laws responsible for the patterns we see in nature, or should they be collapsed into those patterns? In the second part, contributors at the forefront of current debate evaluate the role of laws in contemporary Best System, perspectival, Kantian, and powers- or mechanisms-based approaches. These essays take up pressing questions about whether the laws of nature can be consistent with contingency, whether laws are based on the invariants of scientific theories, and how to deal with exceptions to laws. These twelve essays, published here for the first time, will be required reading for anyone interested in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the histories of these disciplines.

Hobbes's Fifth Law of Nature and its Implications

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-159
Author(s):  
Rosamond Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Legislative Authority ◽  
Central Piece ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractHobbes presents the fifth Law of Nature, Mutual Accommodation, in Leviathan, Chapter XV. Although a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to the first four Laws of Nature, hardly any mention of the fifth appears in the literature. This paper explains the fifth Law as a central piece of Hobbes's theory and thereby reveals his progressive inclinations. Drawing upon relevant passages in Leviathan I show how Hobbes's view of property allocation and reallocation derives from this Law and how attention to mutual accommodation directs sovereigns to constrain their grasping inclinations and curb their disposition to overextend legislative authority.

The Empirical Stance ? Bas van Fraassen

2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-177
Author(s):  
John Ross Churchill
Keyword(s):  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Bas Van Fraassen ◽  
Empirical Stance

scholarly journals Datos, fenómenos y representación: sobre el estructuralismo empirista de van Fraassen

2015 ◽  
Vol 64 (157) ◽  
pp. 137-149
Author(s):  
José Luis Rolleri
Keyword(s):  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Bas Van Fraassen

<p>En este escrito se analizan ciertos conceptos del estructuralismo empirista de Bas van Fraassen, en particular, el de representación, para intentar una crítica a su posición con respecto al vínculo entre los modelos de las teorías y, en última instancia, el mundo físico por medio de los modelos de datos, a los cuales van Fraassen les adjudica el papel de representantes de los fenómenos. Al final se delinea, a muy grandes rasgos, una alternativa conceptualista.</p>

scholarly journals Realism, empiricism and causal inquiry in International Relations: What is at stake?

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 562-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam R C Humphreys
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Constructive Empiricism ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Scientific Realist ◽  
Bas Van Fraassen ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Everyday World

Discussions of causal inquiry in International Relations are increasingly framed in terms of a contrast between rival philosophical positions, each with a putative methodological corollary — empiricism is associated with a search for patterns of covariation, while scientific realism is associated with a search for causal mechanisms. Scientific realism is, on this basis, claimed to open up avenues of causal inquiry that are unavailable to empiricists. This is misleading. Empiricism appears inferior only if its reformulation by contemporary philosophers of science, such as Bas van Fraassen, is ignored. I therefore develop a fuller account than has previously been provided in International Relations of Van Fraassen’s ‘constructive empiricism’ and how it differs from scientific realism. In light of that, I consider what is at stake in calls for the reconstitution of causal inquiry along scientific realist, rather than empiricist, lines. I argue that scientific realists have failed to make a compelling case that what matters is whether researchers are realists. Constructive empiricism and scientific realism differ only on narrow epistemological and metaphysical grounds that carry no clear implications for the conduct of causal inquiry. Yet, insofar as Van Fraassen has reformed empiricism to meet the scientific realist challenge, this has created a striking disjunction between mainstream practices of causal inquiry in International Relations and the vision of scientific practice that scientific realists and contemporary empiricists share, especially regarding the significance of regularities observed in everyday world politics. Although scientific realist calls for a philosophical revolution in International Relations are overstated, this disjunction demands further consideration.

A Lost Lesson in Keith Lehrer’s Reply to the Consequence Argument

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (4) ◽  
pp. 545-558
Author(s):  
Michael McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Consequence Argument ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Positive Account

Abstract In this article, the author examines Keith Lehrer’s response to the Consequence Argument. He argues that his response has advantages over David Lewis’s. Contrary to what Lewis suggests in a footnote, Lehrer’s assessment of an ability to affect the laws of nature in deterministic settings is largely the same as Lewis’s. However, Lehrer’s position has an advantage that Lewis’s lacks. Lehrer integrates his proposal within a positive account of freedom, and this helps to explain how it could be that an agent is able to do otherwise in deterministic settings in such a way that if she did, some law of nature would be different.

Laws of Nature

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-133
Author(s):  
Richard Corry
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Power And Influence

This chapter investigates how an ontology of power and influence might help us answer the question ‘What is it to be a law of nature?’ In particular, the chapter investigates how this ontology might help us develop the dispositional essentialist account of laws as it is presented by Alexander Bird. It is argued that Bird's derivation of laws from dispositions only works if we combine the view that some properties are powers in Bird's sense (they have an essential dispositional nature that is modally fixed) with the view that the relevant properties are powers in the sense developed in this book (they are dispositions to manifest causal influence).

Causation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Water Solubility ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
Causal Order ◽  
Electric Voltage ◽  
Singular Causation ◽  
Complex Organization ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Causal Laws

Two opposed viewpoints raise complementary problems about causation. The first is from Hume: watch the child kick the ball. You see the foot touch the ball and the ball move off. But do you see the foot cause the ball to move? And if you do not see it, how do you know that that is what happened? Indeed if all our experience is like this, and all of our ideas come from experience, where could we get the idea of causation in the first place? The second is from Kant. We can have no ideas at all with which to experience nature – we cannot experience the child as a child nor the motion as a motion – unless we have organized the experience into a causal order in which one thing necessarily gives rise to another. The problem for the Kantian viewpoint is to explain how, in advance of experiencing nature in various specific ways, we are able to provide such a complex organization for our experience. For the Kantian the objectivity of causality is a presupposition of our experience of events external to ourselves. The Humean viewpoint must find something in our experience that provides sufficient ground for causal claims. Regular associations between putative causes and effects are the proposed solution. This attention to regular associations connects the Humean tradition with modern statistical techniques used in the social sciences to establish causal laws. Modern discussions focus on three levels of causal discourse. The first is about singular causation: about individual ‘causings’ that occur at specific times and places, for example, ‘the cat lapped up the milk’. The second is about causal laws: laws about what features reliably cause or prevent other features, as in, ‘rising inflation prevents unemployment’. The third is about causal powers. These are supposed to determine what kinds of singular causings a feature can produce or what kinds of causal laws can be true of it – ‘aspirins have the power to relieve headaches’ for example. Contemporary anglophone work on causality has centred on two questions. First, ‘what are the relations among these levels?’ The second is from reductive empiricisms of various kinds that try to bar causality from the world, or at least from any aspects of the world that we can find intelligible: ‘what is the relation between causality (on any one of the levels) and those features of the world that are supposed to be less problematic?’ These latter are taken by different authors to include different things. Sensible or measurable properties like ‘redness’ or ‘electric voltage’ have been attributed a legitimacy not available to causal relations like ‘lapping-up’ or ‘pushing over’: sometimes it is ‘the basic properties studied by physics’. So-called ‘occurrent’ properties have also been privileged over dispositional properties (like water-solubility) and powers. At the middle level where laws of nature are concerned, laws about regular associations between admissible features – whether these associations are deterministic or probabilistic – have been taken as superior to laws about what kinds of effects given features produce.

Miracles and the Laws of Nature

Dialogue ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Larmer
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Law Of Nature

In discussing the relation between miracles and the laws of nature, it is important to make clear what one means when one employs the terms “miracle” and “law of nature”. This is essential, since both terms may be used in a number of different ways. I wish to begin, therefore, by briefly indicating how I shall use these terms. I shall then be in a position t o discuss the relation between these particular concepts of miracles and the laws of nature.

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