Marc Lange, Natural Laws in Scientific Practice

REVIEW : Marc Lange , Laws and Lawmakers : Science , Metaphysics , and the Laws of Nature

Lange and Laws, Kinds, and Counterfactuals

In this paper I examine and question Marc Lange’s account of laws, and his claim that the law delineating the range of natural kinds of fundamental particle has a lesser grade of necessity that the laws connecting the fundamental properties of those kinds with their derived properties.

Scientific Method in Practice

The Nature of Natural Laws

That laws of nature play a vital role in explanation, prediction, and inductive inference is far clearer than the nature of the laws themselves. My hope here is to shed some light on the nature of natural laws by developing and defending the view that they involve genuine relations between properties. Such a position is suggested by Plato, and more recent versions have been sketched by several ...

Scientific laws as tools for taxonomy

Many people hold that laws of empirical sciences are general hypotheses whose validity is tested by observations. According to them, these kind of tests are done as follows. Given a law, from a conjunction of this law with some other hypotheses several sentences are deduced. These deduced sentences make assertions about phenomena which should be observed at some specified times and places. Then...