Laws of Nature
The "laws of nature" are the general ways of working of the physical and mental world. Many natural scientists have as one of their great aims the uncovering of these laws. The topic of laws of nature has been the subject of vigorous discussion in contemporary philosophy. Three broad tendencies have emerged, with a number of important variations within these tendencies.
The Regularity or Humean View
Since the work of David Hume, at least, there have been many philosophers, particularly those in the empiricist tradition, who have tried to analyze both causes and laws (which they tend not to distinguish very clearly) in terms of mere regular successions or other regularities in the behavior of things. Laws tell us that, given a phenomenon of a certain sort, then a further phenomenon of a certain sort must occur in a certain relation to the first phenomenon. Particularly since the rise of quantum physics, this may be modified by saying that there must be a certain probability that the further phenomenon will occur. Regularity theorists see this "must" as mere universality: This is what always happens.
A great many difficulties have been raised against this position (for a fairly full listing see Armstrong 1983, pt.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 2,187 words (approx. 7 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Laws of Nature Access Pass.
