Causal and Non-Causal Laws

Abstract

In the preceding chapter, we touched upon a distinction in the content of laws that may serve as at least one principle of classification of them. This was the distinction between laws which were presumed true but because of the limitations of our knowledge could only be known to be probable, and those presumed true but which made probability assertions. This is tantamount to a distinction between laws which asserted necessary relations and those which affirmed probable relations. This distinction is basically a semantic one since it is concerned with the meaning of the laws and not with formal structure although to some degree this could be treated as a formal distinction (say, by differentiating between equations in which the exponential function occurred and those in which it did not). In this chapter I will be concerned chiefly with the logical structure of causal and non-causal laws and not with what the existence of such laws signifies for physical reality. This latter is a problem in its own right but belongs to a discussion not of the logic of science in the narrower sense of the term but to the semantics of scientific theories.