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Laws, Counterfactuals, Stability, and Degrees of Lawhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Marc Lange
Marc Lange*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Washington
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, Box 353350, Seattle, WA 98195–3350; e-mail: mlange@u.washington.edu.
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Abstract

I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not “broader”—at least in the most straightforward sense.) The stability distinctive of the laws is used to explicate what it would mean for there to be multiple grades (or degrees) of physical necessity. Whether there are is for science to discover.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 243 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I wish to thank Harold Hodes and two anonymous referees from Philosophy of Science for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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