Laws of nature have long been thought to have special significance
for aspects of scientific reasoning such as counterfactual
conditionals, inductive projections, and scientific explanations.
But the laws' distinctive roles in scientific reasoning have proved
notoriously difficult to identify precisely, leading some
philosophers even to suggest that there are no such roles. The aim
of this book is to determine these roles and see what a law of
nature must be in order for the laws to function as they do in
scientific practice. Lange shows that the laws possess a uniquely
broad range of invariance under counterfactual perturbations, a
range that for the first time is characterised without appealing to
the concept of a law. It is argued that the laws fail to supervene
on the nonnomic facts, just as the rules governing chess fail to
supervene on the moves made in a given actual game. It is also
argued, against both regularity accounts and analyses of laws as
relations among universals, that a law need not be associated with
an exceptionless regularity. It is explained how a law of one
scientific field (e.g. cardiology) can be an accident of another
(e.g. fundamental physics). Special attention is paid to laws of
biology and other 'special sciences', and it is argued that their
distinctive range of invariance allows these fields to supply
scientific explanations that are irreducible, even in principle, to
explanations in terms of fundamental physics. Another special
feature of this book is its emphasis on the distinction between
laws of nature and physically necessary coincidences, a distinction
crucial to the concept of natural kind. An account is also given of
'meta-laws', such as symmetry principles. Among the philosphers
receiving special discussion are Lewis, Goodman, van Fraassen,
Armstrong, Dretske, Earman, Mill, Fodor, Hempel, Giere, Putnam,
Dennett, and Mackie.
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