![]() ![]() If the demon knew all the laws pertaining to the interaction of matter particles and the exact configuration of all the matter in the universe at a certain moment of time, he would be able to predict with absolute accuracy the state of the entire world at any future moment, as well as retrodict its past states. Some laws are deterministic, the paradigm example being the laws of Newtonian mechanics, which prompted the astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 –1827) to invoke his famous image of a demon capable of performing an arbitrary number of calculations in a finite amount of time. The sciences display a wide variety of laws. ![]() ![]() In was, however, challenged in twentieth-century philosophy, especially after the demise of logical positivism, the rise of scientific realism, and the revival of metaphysics. This interpretation received a stamp of approval in the empiricist tradition and especially in the philosophy of David Hume (1711 –1776). Rather than being imposed on phenomena, they simply reflected the way things are. Such regularities were widely interpreted as being descriptive, not prescriptive. The view of laws as regularities capable of being inductively inferred (or even "deduced," as Isaac Newton thought) from phenomena and then used in prediction and explanation became firmly entrenched in the new science of mechanics and in many other disciplines in the decades following the scientific revolution. 1220 –1292) and Johannes Kepler (1571 –1630) advanced a quite different conception of law that was free of theological connotations and had to do with observable and measurable regularities in nature. But alongside this divine-necessitation understanding, natural scientists and philosophers as different as Roger Bacon (c. Even as late as the Enlightenment age, philosophers such as Montesquieu (1689 –1755) attributed the order of nature to the hand of God. The mathematician and philosopher Ren é Descartes (1596 –1650), in particular, explicitly related his law of inertia to the sustaining power of God. This notion is clearly associated with the prescribing force various laws ( lex, regula ) possess due to their origin in God's will -be they the natural laws of moral conduct or the laws of mechanics. The ancestors of this concept, however, are old and include the ideas of social, legal, and moral order, which themselves can be traced to the notion of divine legislation. Most historians agree that the concept of scientific law as it is used today did not become widely accepted until the scientific revolution marking the birth of modern science. The question of whether laws describe or prescribe the course of nature has always been given particular emphasis in the debates. Finally, it is a matter of controversy how the laws of various disciplines are related to each other.ĭo laws describe or prescribe? Some historical background It is also unclear whether any single theory could do justice to the diverse kinds of laws used in different scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc.). But are the laws of nature real? Do they belong to the world or do they rather reflect the way people speak about it? Do they merely describe the facts and processes in nature or do they govern them? In other words, do laws possess a modal force, the force of nomological necessity, not attaching to merely contingent facts? And if they do, how does one get a handle on this important distinction between laws and nonlawful accidental generalizations? These questions continue to be widely debated and there is no generally accepted philosophical theory of the laws of nature. Statements of the laws of nature provide the most systematic and unified account of phenomena they are used to make predictions, and they figure centrally in explanation. It is generally held that the search for laws is part and parcel of natural science.
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