Abstract
This essay on scientific laws has two parts. (I) Part I, (Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7), (Burnishing the Legacy, Laws and explanations.) and Part II (Chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12), Devoted to the explanation of laws by theories: Schematic and non-schematic theories, two kinds of explanation, and the physical modals that each theory provides, and the nomic modals that are associated with laws.
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Notes
- 1.
In private conversation, Armstrong said that he hadn’t thought of the contrapositive. I don’t know what his solution might be, or if he returned to the issues involved. Clearly his distinction between derived and underived laws in What is a Law of Nature, will not help.
- 2.
Recall that physical magnitudes are functions, and functions (say those of one argument for example) are relations R(x, y) such that if R(x, y) and R(x, z), then x = z.
- 3.
D. Lewis, Counterfactuals, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973, p. 73.
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Koslow, A. (2019). Introduction. In: Laws and Explanations; Theories and Modal Possibilities. Synthese Library, vol 410. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18846-7_1
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