Laws Are Not Descriptions

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Are Miracles Violations of the Laws of Nature?

Classical theism holds that God rules the world not only indirectly, by the natural laws established with creation, but through actions or direct interventions that interfere with natural processes and human actions. These direct interventions are usually called miracles. Modern Western philosophy, at least starting from Spinoza and Hume, has defined miracles as “violations of the laws of natur...

Laws are conditionals

The ubiquitous schema ‘All Fs are Gs’ dominates much philosophical discussion on laws but rarely is it shown how actual laws mentioned and used in science are supposed to fit it. After consideration of a variety of laws, including those obviously conditional and those superficially not conditional (such as equations), I argue that we have good reason to support the traditional interpretation of...

Are Deterministic Descriptions And Indeterministic Descriptions Observationally Equivalent?

The central question of this paper is: are deterministic and indeterministic descriptions observationally equivalent in the sense that they give the same predictions? I tackle this question for measuretheoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes, both of which are ubiquitous in science. I first show that for many measure-theoretic deterministic systems there is a stochastic process ...

Laws Are Persistent Inductive Schemes

The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has taken various forms and dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Hence, ranking theory with its resources of formalizing defeasible reasoning or inductive schemes seems ideally suited to explicate the idea in a formal way. This ...