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Stability and lawlikeness

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Abstract

There appear to be no biological regularities that have the properties traditionally associated with laws, such as an unlimited scope or holding in all or many possible background conditions. Mitchell, Lange, and others have therefore suggested redefining laws to redeem the lawlike status of biological regularities. These authors suggest that biological regularities are lawlike because they are pragmatically or paradigmatically similar to laws or stable regularities. I will review these re-definitions by arguing both that there are difficulties in applying their accounts to biology and difficulties in the accounts themselves, which suggests that the accounts are not adequate to redeem the lawlike status of biological regularities. Finally, I will suggest a new account of laws that also shows how non-laws might function in some of the roles of laws.

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Notes

  1. Some common trends emerge in the papers that discuss stability in the context of laws. First, although explicit definitions of stability are missing in these papers, it becomes clear once we look at their examples of stability that they have understood stability in the sense of constancy or inertia, which, second, are not distinguished from one another (Woodward 1992; Cooper 1998; Lipton 1999). Third, other stability concepts are neglected, with Mitchell (1997, 2000, 2002) being an exception to this and who also discusses trajectory stability. There does not seem to be anyone who discusses—in the context of laws—persistence, elasticity, amplitude, and cyclical stability, although insofar as manipulations and control of systems are concerned, these are important properties (Odenbaugh 2001; Justus 2008). Fourth, some authors confuse scope with stability and/or stability with invariance, even though the three are different and play different roles in scientific explanations (see section “Conclusions”).

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Acknowledgments

The work was supported financially by the Academy of Finland as a part of the project Causal and Mechanistic Explanations in the Environmental Sciences (Project No. 1258020). I am grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal, who provided helpful comments and suggestions on a previous draft of the paper. A version of the paper was presented at the Philosophy of Science Group/Trends and Tensions in Intellectual Integration seminar, on October 26, 2009, at the University of Helsinki, Finland. For their suggestions made then, the author would like to thank Till Grüne-Yanoff, Inkeri Koskinen, Jaakko Kuorikoski, Caterina Marchionni, Uskali Mäki, Kati Näätsaari, Tuomas Pärnu, Samuli Pöyhönen, Päivi Seppälä, and Petri Ylikoski. I am grateful also to Marc Lange who made helpful suggestions about a draft version of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 24, SF - 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Jani Raerinne

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Raerinne, J. Stability and lawlikeness. Biol Philos 28, 833–851 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9386-y

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