Some Recent Work on the Problem of Law

Abstract

It is widely agreed that ‘scientific law’ (or ‘law of nature’) is one of the key scientific terms which any adequate philosophy of science must attempt to clarify or define. The importance of the concept ‘law’ is made evident by the fact that the distinctive functions of science—explanation and prediction—are usually analyzed with reference to laws. Thus events are explained by showing that descriptions of them are deducible from laws (conjoined with suitable statements of “initial conditions”), and laws are utilized in deducing descriptions of unknown future events, thereby permitting their prediction. Moreover, it has recently become clear that the concept ‘law’ is relevant to the analysis of counterfactual conditionals, disposition terms, and the physical modalities. An adequate explication of ‘law’, then, will further the analysis of these important concepts.