Laws of Nature
There are few ideas as regularly abused as 'laws of nature'. The source of this abuse stems from treating such laws as what are called 'covering laws': laws that cover each and every case of action, no matter how minute or detailed. Crudely put, the idea is that for everything that happens in nature, there is law or laws that corresponds to it. But laws of nature are not of this kind. In fact, no law at all is of this kind. Why? Because laws - natural or otherwise - are, at best, limits on action, they specify the bounds within which action takes place. While nothing can 'violate' the laws (this is what lends them their universality), there is no sense in which the laws are always applicable.
The philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright explains this idea best: "Covering-law theorists tend to think that nature is well-regulated; in the extreme, that there is a law to cover every case. I do not. I imagine that natural objects are much like people in societies. Their behaviour is constrained by some specific laws and by a handful of general principles, but it is not determined in detail, even statistically. What happens on most occasions is dictated by no law at all.... God may have written just a few laws and grown tired." (Cartwright, How The Laws of Physics Lie).
The line in bold is worth emphasising: for the vast majority of action, the laws are simply silent: they neither specify anything positive nor negative. Bike riding laws for example, while universal in whichever state they apply, simply have nothing to say about spheres of action that have nothing to do with bike riding. The same is true of the 'laws of nature', which while universal and inviolable, are for the vast majority of phenomena simply inapplicable. The point here is to affirm the universality of laws of nature, while denying that they function as covering-laws.
One prominent field in which covering-law error is most apparent is in popular - and wrong - (mis)understandings of evolution, where is it often said that, for example, '(the laws of) natural selection govern all of evolution'. While it is true that nothing can violate natural selection (maladaptions will likely lead to extinction), it is also the case that most biological variation is 'adaptively neutral': there are variations - perhaps the majority of them - that are neither adaptive nor maladaptive, and to which natural selection remains 'blind'. Again, the point is that while natural selection is both universal and inviolable in biology, nothing about this universality or inviolability means that natural selections 'governs' each and every aspect of a species. Laws in this sense are more 'negative' than they are 'positive': they say what cannot be done, not 'determine' what can be; like natural selection, such laws are simply 'blind' to most of what happens in the universe.
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It's also possible to deny that laws of nature have any place in science whatsoever, insofar as they might simply be considered as residues of theology [pdf], as Cartwright actually does, but I'm more interested in circumscribing the scope of such laws than denying them outright.
The philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright explains this idea best: "Covering-law theorists tend to think that nature is well-regulated; in the extreme, that there is a law to cover every case. I do not. I imagine that natural objects are much like people in societies. Their behaviour is constrained by some specific laws and by a handful of general principles, but it is not determined in detail, even statistically. What happens on most occasions is dictated by no law at all.... God may have written just a few laws and grown tired." (Cartwright, How The Laws of Physics Lie).
The line in bold is worth emphasising: for the vast majority of action, the laws are simply silent: they neither specify anything positive nor negative. Bike riding laws for example, while universal in whichever state they apply, simply have nothing to say about spheres of action that have nothing to do with bike riding. The same is true of the 'laws of nature', which while universal and inviolable, are for the vast majority of phenomena simply inapplicable. The point here is to affirm the universality of laws of nature, while denying that they function as covering-laws.
One prominent field in which covering-law error is most apparent is in popular - and wrong - (mis)understandings of evolution, where is it often said that, for example, '(the laws of) natural selection govern all of evolution'. While it is true that nothing can violate natural selection (maladaptions will likely lead to extinction), it is also the case that most biological variation is 'adaptively neutral': there are variations - perhaps the majority of them - that are neither adaptive nor maladaptive, and to which natural selection remains 'blind'. Again, the point is that while natural selection is both universal and inviolable in biology, nothing about this universality or inviolability means that natural selections 'governs' each and every aspect of a species. Laws in this sense are more 'negative' than they are 'positive': they say what cannot be done, not 'determine' what can be; like natural selection, such laws are simply 'blind' to most of what happens in the universe.
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It's also possible to deny that laws of nature have any place in science whatsoever, insofar as they might simply be considered as residues of theology [pdf], as Cartwright actually does, but I'm more interested in circumscribing the scope of such laws than denying them outright.
Comments (100)
Quoting MonfortS26
Because, if so, I perfectly agree with you. However, there are many threads, and many posts, that argue along these lines, with respect to how evolution does mandate, or at least favour, particular kinds of attributes or elements of human nature. In fact they’re writ large in a great deal of popular philosophy and evolutionary biology.
First, of course, there are no "laws of nature." There are only general descriptions of how things behave.
Quoting StreetlightX
Wouldn't a materialist say that everything - from the behavior of subatomic particles, to consciousness, to the behavior of galaxies - is covered by, controlled by, the laws of physics? Even discounting that, can we say that, even though a particular phenomenon may not be controlled by a particular law of nature, everything is controlled by some law of nature?
The curious thing about the laws is that they are almost entirely undescriptive. In fact, one of the most interesting things that Cartwirght demonstrates is that there is an inverse relation to how true a law is, and how much explanatory power it has. Her discussion of this point is worth quoting at length:
"The laws of physics do not provide true descriptions of reality. ... [Consider] the the law of universal gravitation [F=Gmm?/r^2] ... Does this law truly describe how bodies behave? Assuredly not. It is not true that for any two bodies the force between them is given by the law of gravitation. Some bodies are charged bodies, and the force between them is not Gmm?/r^2. For bodies which are both massive and charged, the law of universal gravitation and Coulomb's law (the law that gives the force between two charges) interact to determine the final force. But neither law by itself truly describes how the bodies behave. No charged objects will behave just as the law of universal gravitation says; and any massive objects will constitute a counterexample to Coulomb's law.
These two laws are not true; worse, they are not even approximately true. In the interaction between the electrons and the protons of an atom, for example, the Coulomb effect swamps the gravitational one, and the force that actually occurs is very different from that described by the law of gravity. There is an obvious rejoinder: I have not given a complete statement of these two laws, only a shorthand version. [There ought to be] an implicit ceteris paribus ('all things equal') modifier in front, which I have suppressed. Speaking more carefully ... If there are no forces other than gravitational forces at work, then two bodies exert a force between each other which varies inversely as the square of the distance between them, and varies directly as the product of their masses
I will allow that this law is a true law, or at least one that is held true within a given theory. But it is not a very useful law. One of the chief jobs of the law of gravity is to help explain the forces that objects experience in various complex circumstances. This law can explain in only very simple, or ideal, circumstances. It can account for why the force is as it is when just gravity is at work; but it is of no help for cases in which both gravity and electricity matter. Once the ceteris paribus modifier has been attached, the law of gravity is irrelevant to the more complex and interesting situations." (How the Laws of Physics Lie.
Quoting T Clark
A vulgar, unreflective materialism, maybe. But I can imagine few things more theologically charged than the idea that 'there is a law that covers everything'; Materialism ought to - and can do - better than such vulgarities. The physicist Paul Davis writes nicely on this: "The very notion of physical law has its origins in theology. The idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws comes straight out of monotheism, which was the dominant influence in Europe at the time science as we know it was being formulated by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, so physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. Furthermore, Christians believe the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, physicists declare that the universe is governed by eternal laws, but the laws remain impervious to events in the universe. I think this entire line of reasoning is now outdated and simplistic".
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/spaceexploration.comment
The paper I mentioned and linked to in the OP at the end by Cartwright ("No Gods, No Laws") similarly makes the case that physical laws can only make sense with the invocation of a God, which is all the more reason to treat physical laws with extreme prejudice.
Boy, this, along with the rest of the quoted text, is really wrong, or at least trivially correct. A quibble about language. As I implied in the first line of my post, I don't find the idea of a law of nature a very useful one, and I agree it's misleading, but once we've decided to discuss things in those terms, I, and most other people with an interest in science, have no problem applying the concept. Come on - just because the law of universal gravitation doesn't necessarily describe all the forces on a massive object, doesn't mean it doesn't tell us something important about how matter behaves. I'm guessing you disagree. Please explain.
[quote=Cartwright]It can account for why the force is as it is when just gravity is at work; but it is of no help for cases in which both gravity and electricity matter[/quote]
Didn't she already supply the solution here:
[quote=Cartwright]For bodies which are both massive and charged, the law of universal gravitation and Coulomb's law (the law that gives the force between two charges) interact to determine the final force[/quote]
That is, the laws of physics together describe how things behave. Which means that this is wrong:
Quoting StreetlightX
Surely we can, and do, apply multiple laws?
There's not really much to disagree - or agree - with though. "Tells us something important". Sure, Ok, as far as a vague 'something important' goes.
How is the something important that the law of universal gravitation describes vague? Two bodies with the property we call "mass" tend to move towards each other in a regular way which can be quantified, whether we describe that tendency as a force or a bending of space-time.
What prompted this thread was one of my frequent criticisms of what I refer to as 'Darwinian rationalism' - that is on of the 'anti-science screed' you're referring to. And what I said to prompt it was a remark about how evolutionary theory tends to rationalise every human attribute in terms of 'what enhances survival'. You see posts all the time about this - the one I quoted was an example, but there are countless more. And it's because it's the 'scientific' way of understanding human nature, right? None of this religious nonsense - we're for Scientific Facts. So let's not try and drag it into abstruse metaphysics.
Actually one of the better commentators on this is the very prim and proper English philosopher, Mary Midgley - a personal favourite of Dawkins! - whose book Evolution as a Religion lays it out rather nicely. Helped by the fact that she is at least a 'non-theist', at least certainly has no ID ax to grind. She just knows scientistic nonsense when she sees it, and she sees a lot of it in pop darwinian philosophizing, which is endemic in the Academy nowadays.
Heh, I was waiting for this rejoinder, but didn't want to drop an even bigger quote than I did, because this is exactly what she addresses in the section right after (sorry for the long quote but it's just easier this way and I'm lazy):
"The vector addition story is, I admit, a nice one. But it is just a metaphor. We add forces (or the numbers that represent forces) when we do calculations. Nature does not ‘add’ forces. ... [On the vector addition account], Coulomb's law and the law of gravity come out true because they correctly describe what influences are produced—here, the force due to gravity and the force due to electricity. The vector addition law then combines the separate influences to predict what motions will occur. This seems to me to be a plausible account of how a lot of causal explanation is structured. But as a defence of the truth of fundamental laws, it has two important drawbacks.
First, in many cases there are no general laws of interaction. Dynamics, with its vector addition law, is quite special in this respect. This is not to say that there are no truths about how this specific kind of cause combines with that, but rather that theories can seldom specify a procedure that works from one case to another. Without that, the collection of fundamental laws loses the generality of application which [vector addition] hopes to secure.
In practice engineers handle irreversible processes with old fashioned phenomenological laws describing the flow (or flux) of the quantity under study. Most of these laws have been known for quite a long time. For example there is Fick's law... Equally simple laws describe other processes: Fourier's law for heat flow, Newton's law for sheering force (momentum flux) and Ohm's law for electric current. Each of these is a linear differential equation in t, giving the time rate of change of the desired quantity (in the case of Fick's law, the mass). Hence a solution at one time completely determines the quantity at any other time. Given that the quantity can be controlled at some point in a process, these equations should be perfect for determining the future evolution of the process. They are not.
The trouble is that each equation is a ceteris paribus law. It describes the flux only so long as just one kind of cause is operating. [Vector addition] if it works, buys facticity, but it is of little benefit to (law) realists who believe that the phenomena of nature flow from a small number of abstract, fundamental laws. The fundamental laws will be severely limited in scope. Where the laws of action go case by case and do not fit a general scheme, basic laws of influence, like Coulomb's law and the law of gravity, may give true accounts of the influences that are produced; but the work of describing what the influences do, and what behaviour results, will be done by the variety of complex and ill-organized laws of action."
But the point is they don't, except in highly idealised situations, 'do so in a regular way that can be quantified'. Your statement is literally untrue for all but a very, very small number of situations, and situations almost definitely artificial at that.
But it is not the scientific way of understanding nature. That's the point. You'd like it to be the 'scientific way' of understanding nature, because it provides more fuel for your anti-science proclivities. But so much the worse for those proclivities - and the pseudo-science it militates against. A pox on both houses.
I guess I was thinking that facticity--which the laws give us, or can give us--does amount to descriptiveness, even if they don't amount to the metaphysical grounding that the law realists claim for them.
She comes close to the famous scientific anti-realism of Bas van Fraassen, who is an anti-realist about entities, precisely because he believes that it's all just a case of organising and classifying our knowledge. But Cartwright's point is that if you pay attention to the peculiar status of laws, one can admit this without being an anti-realist about entities. @Banno put it once nicely in a post long ago - something like: the point of scientific equations is to add up nicely. It struck me as barbarous at the time, but I've come to see it as making a great deal of sense.
If changes in motion are equivalent to changes in direction and changes in a magnitude, is it then surprising that a mathematical language that allows us to relate changes in direction and changes in magnitude to other changes in direction and changes in magnitude allows for the description of motions in general?
Forces enter the picture as what drives changes in motion. This is a restatement of Newton's first law.
Forces add as vectors - changes in direction and changes in magnitude interact together as vector changes - this is essentially Newton's second law - multiply the changes induced in motion by vectors (see law 1) by the mass of the changing thing (or the mass as a function of time, or the mass as a function of momentum and energy) and you get the full statement of it.
Newton's third law is what interprets forces as body-body interactions, specifically a force projecting from A to B induces/is equivalent (in magnitude but opposite direction) from a force projecting from B to A. This is the same as saying that the relative position vector from A to B, [math]v_{AB}[/math] is equal to [math]-v_{BA}[/math]
Newton's laws aren't just formal predictive apparatuses like (most) statistical models, they're based on physical understanding. They aren't just mathematical abstractions either, the use of mathematics in physics is constrained by (as physicists put it) 'physical meaning'.
The mathematics doesn't care that the Coulomb Force law (alone) predicts that electrons spiral towards nuclei. The physics does.
Laws are models of the way things are. If there are limits in the laws, then that is a representation of the limits in nature.
Quoting StreetlightXSo people don't have any reason for what they do outside of some specific laws and a handful of general principles? Nonsense.
Their behavior is constrained by the shape and size of their body and the scope of their memory. What happens in every occasion is dictated by the causes that came before any said occasion. We just haven't explained every natural causal force and its related effect - so it can seem like there aren't any laws for certain occasions. We just haven't gotten around to explaining every causal relationship. Be patient.
Of course these laws just abide to their context. Newtonian physics works just fine for nearly all questions, but not for everything, and hence we have to have things like relativity.
Now could our understanding change from the present? Of course! Some even more neat and useful theory could replace the existing ones, but it likely wouldn't be proving the earlier "laws" false or erroneous, but that the earlier theories said to be laws haven't covered everything and that there's simply a different point of view.
Really? No way, unless infinity is considered a boundary. Quoting StreetlightX
And you know this how?Quoting StreetlightX
And the proof is?Quoting StreetlightX
I guess this means that the universal and inviolable can be violated?
It seems that the Laws of Nature is completely fabricated. They are just sweeping statements that are thrown around to justify some particular point of view. There is zero evidence of any sort that there are any laws governing the completely unpredictable behavior of life, yet science loves to extend some simple models of matter to the behavior of life.
So, in addition to denying the validity of quantum mechanics and relativity, you also deny the validity of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Is that correct? Do you also deny the fact of evolution, whatever the mechanism? Do you believe that all life on earth shares a common genetic heritage because all of it, all of us, share a common ancestor?
All scientific generalization and abstraction, all generalization and abstraction of any kind, is "just a metaphor." Except at the most simplistic level, humans interact with the universe through metaphor.
Quoting StreetlightX
Can you explain what you mean by "phenomenological laws." I looked it up online and the only reference was Cartwright. Does it just mean more concrete, more restricted to a smaller set of phenomena than a universal law? More empirical, ad hoc? Is that what you mean by:
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
Is that a bad thing? We have a tool box full of laws we bring out when we need them. That's basically what engineers do all the time. Or is that what you've been saying? Are there really "law realists" who don't acknowledge the day-to-dayness of the scientific process, even at a practical level? If that's what we're talking about, maybe we don't have a disagreement. Or maybe we still do. I'll think about it.
Final question - is the way I've responded to your post Fisking? Is that a problem?
I largely agree with this, as does Cartwright, for whom fundamental laws are indeed useful as explanatory tools, with the caveat that their explanatory power does not imply their truth, where truth is simply understood in the naive sense of corresponding to the facts of a phenomenon (what she refers to as their 'facticity'). Again the simple idea is that for the most part, F=Gmm?/r^2 - for example - simply is untrue as a description for almost all but a very small set of artificial behaviour.
To crystallize debate, perhaps a simple yes and no question can be asked: do fundamental laws provide accurate, true descriptions of most physical phenomena? It seems to me that the straightforward answer is no. And not even because of issues like Newtonian physics not taking into account quantum physics: on its own terms Netownian mechanics do not accurately describe phenomena. F=ma is almost universally untrue for any moving body one might care to measure in the real world. Which is again not to detract from it's explanatory power.
Agreed. I was trying to argue against the overreach of natural selection/instinct on all human behavior for example in a couple threads.
Interesting thread!
How would you differentiate entities from theories?
I ask because, as an old hack of a chemist, it seems that positing entities were part and parcel to theory.
Also, how would this analysis fair when considering thermodynamics? I have in mind the 2nd law, in particular. It's extremely abstract, but doesn't really deal with entities as much (as I understand it), but does seem quite universal ((edit: I should use your terminology better. Not universal, but rather a cover-law)) in that it's often linked to the arrow of time.
I disagree. Scientific modelling is a very specific process in which a system of inferences available in a formal system (the model) can be made to/ought to match the system of causal relations in a natural system. Cf. Robert Rosen's modelling relation:
Note that Rosen distinguishes a model from a simulation: whereas a model specifically aims to redouble causal relations by means of formal entailments, a simulation does not (the entailment relations in a simulation are a 'black box', one simply tinkers with the knobs until the simulation 'looks right'). Conway's 'game of life' would be one such example of a simulation. Or else something like Stéphane Leduc's famous 'models' of life (created using some clever chemistry) which look and sometimes even act like living things, are also mere simulations, and not models of life, and they are simulations because they do not replicate the causal relations involved in living things. Their 'parameters of change' are entirely different. An example of Ludec's work (which was a scientific bombshell when he published, although his name is forgotten today):
(Evelyn Fox Keller describes Leduc's work: "by employing a variety of metallic salts and alkaline silicates (for example, ferrocyanide of copper, potash, and sodium phosphate) and adjusting their proportions and the stage of “growth” at which they were added, Leduc was able to produce a number of spectacular effects—inorganic structures exhibiting a quite dramatic similitude to the growth and form of ordinary vegetable and marine life . By “appropriate means,” it proved possible to produce “terminal organs resembling flowers and seed-capsules,” “corral-like forms,” and “remarkable fungus-like forms.” (Fox-Keller, Making Sense of Life)
Rosen has a more mathematically rigorous way to distinguish between models and simulations, but the gist is conveyed I hope. The larger point is that to call scientific modelling a 'metaphor' severely understates what is involved in modelling, with metaphors being more akin to simulations.
Quoting T Clark
A quick example from Cartwright because I've written too much already: "Francis Everitt, a distinguished experimental physicist and biographer of James Clerk Maxwell, picks Airy's law of Faraday's magneto-optical effect as a characteristic phenomenological law. In a paper with Ian Hacking, he reports, ‘Faraday had no mathematical theory of the effect, but in 1846 George Biddell Airy (1801–92), the English Astronomer Royal, pointed out that it could be represented analytically in the wave theory of light by adding to the wave equations, which contain second derivatives of the displacement with respect to time, other ad hoc terms, either first or third derivatives of the displacement.’ Everitt and Hacking contrast Airy's law with other levels of theoretical statement—‘physical models based on mechanical hypotheses,... formal analysis within electromagnetic theory based on symmetry arguments’, and finally, ‘a physical explanation in terms of electron theory’ given by Lorentz, which is ‘essentially the theory we accept today’.
Everitt distinguishes Airy's phenomenological law from the later theoretical treatment of Lorentz, not because Lorentz employs the unobservable electron, but rather because the electron theory explains the magneto-optical effect and Airy's does not. Phenomenological laws describe what happens. They describe what happens in superfluids or meson-nucleon scattering as well as the more readily observed changes in Faraday's dense borosilicate glass, where magnetic fields rotate the plane of polarization"; [ Example of Airy modelling ]
The point of the distinction being that "In modern physics, and I think in other exact sciences as well, phenomenological laws are meant to describe, and they often succeed reasonably well. But fundamental equations are meant to explain, and paradoxically enough the cost of explanatory power is descriptive adequacy. Really powerful explanatory laws of the sort found in theoretical physics do not state the truth."
If you view it from the perspective of psychological hedonism, that all motivation is dictated by pain and pleasure, then even if there is an amount of neutral selection in what makes humans happy there still have to be positive and negative traits associated with that motivation as well. Psychological hedonism is definitely falsifiable and if it is true, the only place those motivations can come from is evolution.
Very helpful, interesting post. This whole thread is interesting and makes me ask myself questions I hadn't before. I like and think I understand the distinction between models and simulations. As for metaphors, I disagree, but we can save that for another discussion. I will say - I think models are metaphors while simulations probably aren't.
Fundamental laws abstract away all initial conditions. They are absolutely general because they carry no history and you get to plug that into the equations as some set of measurements.
Cartwright is making the point that laws are descriptions of constraints. They describe the physical context that impinges on material locales to give them shape as objects or events. And every material locale may have a complex history. The past will have built up a lot of surrounding information in the neighbouring environment which bears causally on what happens next.
A ball will run down a slope. That is a fairly simple example of a set of initial conditions. You could have a law of nature that describes this single situation. The law describes a certain ball, a certain slope, and a certain outcome that must always be seen if the situation is repeated. So the law is absolutely specific, but overloaded with that specificity. It is full of initial conditions descriptions. Physics wants to abstract away everything that is particular about this situation and simply have general laws of motion and gravity - the universal constraints on events - and let you then plug in all the locally special information about some specific history, some specific set of material constraints. Like the locations and characteristics of some ball, some slope.
So every event or object is embedded in a structure of causal relations. The whole thing has a history that individuated it. We then come along and analyse that using our dichotomy of model and measurement. We separate what is going on into general laws or the universe’s most general constraints, and initial conditions, or the universe’s most individual and particular constraints. Some ball and slope is understood as being general in having to be ruled by Newtonian laws, and particular in having their own angles and weights.
However Cartwright is getting carried away in saying the big laws don’t tell truths. That is philosophy of science rhetoric to get her distinctive position noticed.
But then neither is she the first to realise that this is how the “laws of nature” work.
The actual world is the sedimentation of all the symmetry breakings that create some actual state of history. We then need to unwind that context of constraints that impinges to individuate every material locale by making our rather artificial distinction between the most general possible universal rules and the most particular possible locally measured qualities.
The ideal physical theory is an equation that describes a universal symmetry in a state of brokenness - so like, E = mc^2. Then we go measure the particular mass, or energy, to see how it this constraint would relate it.
And to measure the mass of an object or event becomes a further story of constraints. We have to confine or isolate the supposed individual thing somehow. We have to decide when the measurement is accurate enough to give us all the information.
It is constraints all the way down. And measurement becomes an informal art, a matter of judgement and experience we learn to apply to individual cases. The human modeller with his abstracts laws has to re-enter the picture as a constructor or the constraints that fix the initial conditions.
This is where things get tricky in quantum mechanics, nonlinear mechanics, and anything dealing with emergent properties.
In the second sense of truth is basically this: are the laws otherwise than what we have discovered? The answer is no. It is true that F=ma, and not F=ma^2. On the other hand, it is not true that F=ma accurately and precisely describes the bahaviour of most moving bodies. These senses of truth are not in contradiction, because they bear on different domains, or rather, they attempt to respond to different questions (It is an accurate description vs. Is the law otherwise than stated?). The strangeness and unease which might accompany Cartwright's insistence on the 'untruth' of the laws stems from conflating - in a way Cartwright does not - these two uses of truth.
There's a point to be made about how this very nicely captures a Wittgenstienian take on truth - in which truth is what we do with it - but that's perhaps for another thread.
Still an attention getting move more than a reasonable stance. But then outside of philosophy of science, many might think science tells the transcendent truths of reality.
It's a difficult one. :)
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't think that is it at all.
The point - as you said - is that laws are simply descriptions of prevailing constraints. They don't need to be exception-less. Indeed, if reality itself is inherently probabilistic at a fundamental level, then they couldn't be. The laws themselves could only capture the strong probabilities of a Universe that has been around long enough to develop a history of well-regulated habit.
So a law like F=ma is a limit state expression. In an ideal world with nothing to individuate the circumstance, it would apply. But every actual situation is a mess of some particular local history. There are all sorts of other causal influences that could impact on the behaviour of things - create the apparent exceptions.
Newton's laws of course themselves presumed an already constrained world - one that was geometrically flat and where energy scale did not affect the picture. New even more abstract laws were framed to allow the Newtonian cosmos to be viewed as now the special case - flat rather than curved, with its tendency to fluctuations suppressed by it having become so classically cold and expanded.
So the truth-telling is about a hierarchy of constraints. What it gets right is how much of the backdrop that gets taken for granted as the frame of reference is itself turned into a model with fewer constraints and so a need for more symmetry-breaking measurements.
Science is an art that balances the two kinds of information - the modelling and the measuring, the laws and the initial conditions. There is no truth to be discovered so much as that we have to make some pragmatic trade-off which works.
So I disagree with your account in this regard. What you are saying amounts to having to decide if an "accurate description" is to be found in the theory or its measurements? Clearly, the accuracy is a combination of some appropriate level of trade-off. It is how the two work together in practice. This is what needs to be emphasised.
Both cost us an effort. We want to strike the balance that describes the world with the least information. And while you can write F=ma on a t-shirt, do you want to have to measure the state of every individual particle to know what is going on in a complex system?
So "untruth" is really only ever "unefficiency". Even a really bad theory could be acceptable if we are willing to treat every exception as something to be individually explained by some excuse. That's how religion deals with the irregularity of miracles, or psychics with the erratic nature of their forecasts.
In other words, this harking on about truth or veracity shows the grip of another age. We should be more use to pragmatism by now. However that in turn - in being based on a hierarchically-organised constraints-based logic - stands against certain other philosophical leanings.
It is just as wrong to say laws are merely convenient descriptions as to say they are actual truths. That way lies an argument for strong social constructionism.
Pragmatism has to stand in the tricky space between these two extremes. Laws may be just descriptions, but they are also optimal in some way that actually reflects the hierarchical and constraints-based facts of the world. The structure of existence is out there. The exceptionality of nature is being suppressed by its own accumulating history. And science - as an epistemic structure - works best when it adopts the same logic.
Quoting StreetlightX
Exactly what I fear. All this is slanted towards the support of strong PoMo relativism. Out goes the baby with the bathwater as usual.
Not at all. What I'm saying amounts to: pay attention to how we use language, and specifically the varying or non-univocal motivations behinds those uses. Nothing more, nothing less.
It is nevertheless the case that without the knowledge of Newtonian physics, and later Einstein's theory of relativity, that satellites could not be maneuvered into orbit or land on Mars. And they enable such operations with great precision.
The first paper I encountered of Cartwright's was No God, No Laws, (courtesy of McDoodle some time back). It struck me as a sensible piece of work, but hardly earth-shattering. The main claim seems to be, that we can no longer envisage natural laws as behaving as a cause, something that compels a particular outcome. This is predicated on the argument that the idea of 'law' was originally theistic, so that 'nature's laws' were then analogies for divine command. So if one doesn't assume that there is a deity to underwrite those laws, and of course naturalists generally don't, then the very idea of 'law' is called into question, so the metaphor is no longer instructive.
I think the actual issue is something else altogether; that science, when it was 'natural philosophy', assumed that the regularities of nature were indeed 'God's handiwork'. Now, however, having dispensed with God, then they need to be accounted for in some other terms. But the question I would ask is: why presume that science can, or should, explain these regularities. After all, one is able to do considerable work on the basis of simply knowing what they are. It seems to me that a good deal of the commentary around rationalising these laws is motivated by the 'god-shaped hole' that the absence of a creator has left; as if science ought to find it easy to step into the vacuum left by the discovery of the non-existence of God and come up with a 'turtles all the way down' solution, which is proving extraordinarily difficult.
But then, the fact that it's not so easy might actually say something.
And speaking of a 'Wittgensteinian take' on the question - there is an oft-quoted passage from TLP
I dare not ask how......
I used natural selection in my OP as an example of universal 'biological law' - all of biology is subject to it - which nonetheless does not shape all the minuate of biological existence. It is, as Apo says, a general law and not a particular one. The 2nd law actually provides another excellent example of this kind of universality as well: like natural selection, the 2nd law also exerts a kind of 'eliminative pressure': any system that is closed to incoming flows of energy will eventually find itself dissolute. But of course, there are heaps of things that are not theromydnamically closed (hurricanes, ecosystems, living things), and so are able to subsist in a 'metastable' state (a state other than that of the state of least energy):
On the face of it, these systems seem to violate the 2nd law, but they in fact do not. As the classic explanation goes, a local decrease in entropy is always 'paid for' by an increase in global entropy. The upshot is that the 2nd law, while never being violated, nonetheless - just like natural selection - remains 'blind' to a whole range of phenomena (so long as they don't fall below a certain input energy threshold; or, in the case of natural selection, so long as novel traits/changes in the environment do not make the species fall below a threshold of maladaptivity).
This is a complicated one, but the quick answer is that an entity is causative, while a theory is not. An entity is something that causes something to happen. The scientific anti-realist basically says that explanations are fine as explanations - they are organising elements for our understanding - but their truth is a whole other ball game, an 'extra ingredient'. Here, to quote again, is how Cartwright puts it:
"[Anti-realists] argue that explanation has truth going along with it only as an extra ingredient. But causal explanations have truth built into them. When I infer from an effect to a cause, I am asking what made the effect occur, what brought it about. No explanation of that sort explains at all unless it does present a cause; and in accepting such an explanation, I am accepting not only that it explains in the sense of organising and making plain, but also that it presents me with a cause.
My newly planted lemon tree is sick, the leaves yellowing and dropping off. I finally explain this by saying that water has accumulated in the base of the planter: the water is the cause of the disease. I drill a hole in the base of the oak barrel where the lemon tree lives, and foul water flows out. That was the cause. Before I had drilled the hole, I could still give the explanation and to give that explanation was to present the supposed cause, the water. There must be such water for the explanation to be correct. An explanation of an effect by a cause has an existential component, not just an optional extra ingredient. "
I agree, which is why philosophers like Cartwright and physicists like Davis have argued that we either need to drop the reference to laws altogether, or radically revise - by way of deflating - our understanding of them, so as to better shed the dead theological skin in which they encase science. No God, No Laws is the paper I actually linked to in the OP, but another, perhaps more apposite one is Cartwright's "God’s order, man’s order and the order of Nature; [pdf]", in which she argues that biological laws are far better candidates for paradigms of scientific laws than are physical laws:
"Perhaps the traditional view of what counts as proper science with proper laws has been mistaken all along. Contemporary biology seems to have just what it takes to describe nature successfully and to put its knowledge to use ... Various authors conclude that rather than good old-fashioned proper laws biology offers instead: (1) laws that emerge historically, and (2) laws that are contingent. .... They also conclude that biology offers only (3) laws that are not exceptionless. Different kinds of cases lead others to propose that biology studies not laws that describe regular behavior that must occur, but rather mechanisms that, functioning properly and in the right places, can generate regular behavior."
I think these are all good moves, ones which sanction the fact that the 'fundamental laws' are, ironically, more exceptions than rules, limits cases and not paradigmatic ones. That the fundamental laws of physics are taken to be paradigmatic of science - and that people are so taken by promises of 'theories of everything' - speaks more to the vampirism and the hangover of unconscious and powerful religious impulses than it does about the real life practices of science.
I thought we crossed that bridge a long time ago - the problem of induction.
The problem with Nancy Cartwright's outlook is that she's simply serving us old wine in a new bottle.
Science is fully cognizant of its limits and makes no claims of 100% certitude in its discoveries. However, notice how scientific theories are getting more and more precise over time. A good example would be Aristotle -> Newton -> Einstien. It's difficult to ignore a body of knowledge that increases its accuracy in making predictions.
Of course it's a possibility that these laws may not be inviolable but it's a fact that they haven't until now.
Right. So it comes down to asking the right questions to get the right explanation. Philosophy is rife with asking the wrong questions.
F=ma always works when trying to get at the relationship between force mass and acceleration. The formula is used in every NASA mission - most of which are successful. The letters are merely variables for numbers that change in every instance but the relationship always stays the same.
What is ironic is that the people making claims that laws and rules are untrue are themselves trying to establish laws and rules that are true by simply stating and objective facts as if they are true for everyone - that rules and laws are untrue.
Again you go too far and try to assimilate philosophy of science to a social agenda. Let the facts speak for themselves here.
The fundamental laws are fundamental because they take us back to the beginning. If the Cosmos evolved, there has to have been an initial state of high symmetry that then became the current succession of increasingly broken symmetries.
So physics has found - as a central fact - that our Universe appeared in a "Big Bang" and is heading for a "Heat Death". All the individuation we see is the result of symmetries that got broken. These symmetries have the force of mathematical necessity. We found them first via mathematical reasoning. Later it was realised that Nature itself had to be bound by this principle of self-consistent intelligibility and a generalised least action principle.
If science thus fills a hole left by theistic metaphysics, it is because it has shown there was indeed a creation event that was deeply mathematical. The order we see could not have failed to be the case as the simplest form of order that could have developed.
Of course there are a lot of gaps in this story still. Ideally a theory of everything would be able to explain the value of all the initial conditions constants as mathematical necessities. The strengths of the various coupling forces are "accidents" so far as current understanding is concerned. But it is also reasonable speculation that those constants are also mathematically determined by the exact detail of complex symmetry breakings.
So really, scientific excitement about theories of everything which reveal existence to have inevitable mathematical-strength structure is not misplaced. Our descriptions of the fundamental structure of nature is quite the opposite of talk about exceptions. The ontic structure described in terms of symmetry models is as real and central as anything could be. With luck, we will find there could have only been only the one Cosmos at a fundamental level. And that would make it a univocal metaphysics in which exceptions become impossible.
Yes. That outcome might also delight those with a different social or philosophical agenda to your own. But so what?
Unless you believe scientific inquiry ought to be constrained by a quasi-political agenda - making things come out right for pluralism, social constructionism, political correctness, or whatever, at a fundamental physical level - then the science should be left to speak for its own metaphysics.
That physics should have discovered the Cosmos was in fact created, and that its development was already pre-ordained by mathematical-strength principles, is just something philosophy has to get used to.
It is not about filling a hole left by religion. It is about completing a metaphysical project initiated by the Ancient Greek metaphysicians even before the theocrats came along and started nicking their ideas in an attempt to legitimate their various brands of Church.
This is a good short paper - INFORMATION, PHYSICS, QUANTUM: THE SEARCH FOR LINKS
John Archibald Wheeler - http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf
And the longer version - https://what-buddha-said.net/library/pdfs/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf
The opening statement for instance...
So the tricky bit here is that an emergentist approach to physical reality must take a constraints-based approach where the Cosmos arises due to a suppression of its freedoms. This makes the Universe a fundamentally probabilistic exercise. If we zoom in on the "ground of being", we discover only increasingly uncertain fluctuations. There just isn't anything fixed and definite in the way that a story of eternal natural laws operating on fixed initial conditions would seem to demand.
So that appears to support SX's political desire for a PoMo metaphysics of radical contingency. There is nothing God-given about how things should be. The laws themselves dissolve into quantum mush as you put them under the microscope.
However that is half the story. The other half is about the order that must arise if a chaotic mess of fluctuations is also in interaction. If there are correlations between events, then patterns will emerge as organising regularities. And mathematical models - of probabilistic ensembles - show the inevitability of the emergence of this kind of global or macroscopic order.
There might be no law, no limitations at the microscale, but laws or limits are what emerge in predictable fashion at the macroscale. A classical determinism is what finds its full expression as a fact of a process of development.
Breaking a symmetry is just the first step. Once a system has started down that road, it is going to keep going to the end (what is to stop it?). And so the macroscale limit is a system in a state that is fully broken - asymmetric in a fully homogenous fashion. Or one that has arrived at its final resting equilibrium state, as they say.
So modern physics has an emergentist ontology where reality is about "laws" that develop in a succession of increasingly more particularised global constraints. And what characterises a natural law, as opposed to some local "non-holonomic" constraint, is that it applies everywhere equally in the Universe.
But also - the new thing - is that this cascade of symmetry breakings unfolds in time ... as the Cosmos cools and expands. So the ontology is developmental and not existential. We can talk about particle mass before the electro-weak symmetry breaking for example. But that is also a somewhat meaningless concept because before that transition, there was no effective Higgs field to quantify that mass - make "massive" particles actually subject to the gravitational effects of being heavy or light.
Thus laws about massive particles - ones that have to fly along at less than light speed, with all the further symmetry-breaking implications of that - are both universal ... now ... and also merely emergent ... back at some particular time. Early on in the Big Bang, those further constraints were both a mathematical inevitabilty but also only latent as a potential. As "the law", they did not yet exist.
So this Peircean approach - a Cosmos that evolves a regularity of habits due to the inevitability that to exist involves the necessity of a univocal or global intelligibility - is at the heart of a modern scientific approach to Creation.
And Wheeler - back in the 1980s - was pretty clear about the pan-semiotic direction things needed to go. The ground of existence is a relational network of interactions. Quantum information. The questions reality can ask of itself to give itself classical definiteness ... and then the limits to that which are the source of all the quantum "weirdness".
Not quite the beginning, as I understand it - just a moment after.
And the fact that the Universe did then develop in such a way to give rise to stars>matter>life, is the subject of the well-known anthropic cosmological argument. The fact that some physicists promote the idea of a 'multiverse' to avoid that very implication speaks volumes in my opinion.
Quoting apokrisis
'Completing the metaphysical project' assumes that a biological intelligence, which has evolved as a consequence of adaptive necessity, is able to arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, which may be entirely unconnected with it. I don't see any scientific reason for that assumption. (As explored in an old essay by Tom Wolfe.)
Quoting apokrisis
Indeed. And 'Cosmos' means 'an ordered whole'.
Quoting apokrisis
I would put it as 'the ground of existents'.
It depends what you want to believe about time before it got going. It sounds like you want to start the counting of the Planckian moments from zero rather than one. :)
Quoting Wayfarer
You mean that if your metaphysics is of the unconstrained kind that will spawn cosmic infinities, then the anthropic principle is the only constraint you have got left to wield.
The multiverse is not used to evade anthropery. Anthropery is used to make the multiverse feel respectable.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hmm. It's more a conclusion. On the face of it, the thought we can completely understand existence seems implausible. In practice - if you hang out with the science long enough - it instead becomes remarkable how much we can understand in a deep mathematically inevitable way.
I don't know of any reputable physicists who claim that the universe purposely developed to give rise to life. Why isn't life everywhere, or any other place than Earth for that matter? Who knows what kind of varying and interesting molecular interactions there are throughout the universe over its history?
Quoting Wayfarer
Was this a truth statement? If we can't get arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, then how is that you arrived at this idea that we can't? Your statement defeats itself.
It seems to me that survival would be the perfect catalyst for determining the truth (truth being the degree by which your model of the world is accurate). Any organism that is able to perceive its environment in more detail can use its energy more efficiently in finding food and mates.
If you would read physicist Lee Smolin's "Time Reborn", you might come to understand that these so-called fundamental laws are actually extremely limited in their applicability. The laws are produced from the human perspective, which is a small range of possible perspectives midway between the extremely small and the extremely large. Furthermore, the laws are verified by highly controlled experimental conditions, which confine the perspective into an even smaller range of possible perspectives.
When we extrapolate, any tiny error is multiplied, sometimes exponentially. Therefore any extrapolation towards the "beginning", or "end", of the universe is extremely unreliable, and I would say ought to be simply dismissed as unprincipled speculation.
For me, the same is true for laws of nature, from the time I first learned about them in junior high, I think I understood their conditional nature. As an engineer that is even clearer. Engineering solutions tend to be patched together, ad hoc, situation specific, but the laws of thermodynamics and motion can't be avoided. The sum of forces in all directions equal zero or the building falls down.
Whereas I am arguing that the laws represent global constraints. And that now includes the macroscopic correlations that emerge to suppress local degrees of freedom. This is true emergence - where there is also now top-down holism to shape the fine grain of things.
The current laws don’t directly encode that. But you do then have the separate kinds of laws - the various mechanics vs the various thermodynamics - that give you enough of both sides of the story.
So for example, quantum mechanics gets fixed by gluing it to statistical mechanics to give you decoherence theory. More generally, deterministic local physics gets fixed by global information holography. The goal is for a unified physics that puts both aspects of a systems approach together in the same theory - ie: quantum gravity.
So yes, an unconstrained set of micro variables will have nonlinearity. And a purely bottom up mechanics is going to suffer a lack of scaling because of that. We are very used to physicists complaining their theories produce infinities that somehow in reality must get cancelled away. Step back from the microscopic and things explode.
But already physics tames that in various ways by adding in the emergent correlations that would act to suppress the nonlinearIties. The problem is that these constraints are still mostly kluges handcrafted to deal with a particular situation.
On the other hand, we are happy to accept global optimality arguments in science. Biology is comfortable with natural selection as the global invisible hand suppressing nonlinear variety. And condensed matter physics is now mathematically pretty mature.
So I don’t think that my view is radically out of line with Smolin’s. I agree that the fundamental laws alone - the ones that describe the universal microscopic degrees of freedom - can only be half the story. You also need those universally emergent macroscopic constraints that then suppress and shape those freedoms wherever they might occur.
So this is the four causes Aristotelian story. And as has been a point of difference with you in the past, I am saying that finality has to emerge via development. Global constraints are what become fully realised at the end of time. At the beginning of time, they exist only in a potential or latent sense.
What Smolin argues is that while some represent the laws of physics as "global", they really are not. Check out the chapter he calls "Doing Physics in a Box".
[quote=Smolin]The method of restricting attention to a small part of the universe has enabled the success of physics from the time of Galileo.
...
To study a system we need to define what is contained and what is excluded from it. We treat the system as if it were isolated from the rest of the universe, and this isolation itself is a drastic approximation. We cannot remove a system from the universe, so in any experiment we can only decrease, but never eliminate, the outside influences on our system.[/quote]
Also, check out the chapter he calls "The Cosmological fallacy":[quote=Smolin]It remains a great temptation to take a law or principle we can successfully apply to all the world's subsystems and apply it to the universe as a whole. To do so is to commit a fallacy I will call the cosmological fallacy. [/quote]
Quoting apokrisis
Well, we haven't even gotten to the limitations of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and what he calls "the fallacy of applying thermodynamics to the universe as a whole".
`
Right - any organism. And that is a biological observation. It is not a justification of reason. Biology has nothing specific to say about that.
Yes and no. As in, you're right about the language thing, but the stakes are higher than just 'being careful with language'. Holding to a certain view of the laws will always entail holding a certain kind of cosmology or even philosophy. Those who think natural selection governs biology in detail will say stupid things like 'rape is biologically sanctioned' or some other equivalant sociobiological excrescence. Those who cannot understand the scope of 2nd law ought to argue, against all self-evidence, that no physical organization is possible. At stake too are deeper questions about contingency and necessity, nature and culture, and their specific interplay. So language is important, yes, but it is important as a specific index of a host of other, wider, cosmological issues.
Cartwright's next book, The Dappled World, actually programmatically lays out the implications of the approach: "This book supposes that, as appearances suggest, we live in a dappled world, a world rich in different things, with different natures, behaving in different ways. The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid. They do not take after the simple, elegant and abstract structure of a system of axioms and theorems. Rather they look like - and steadfastly stick to looking like - science as we know it: apportioned into disciplines, apparently arbitrarily grown up; governing different sets of properties at different levels of abstraction; pockets of great precision; large parcels of qualitative maxims resisting precise formulation; erratic overlaps; here and there, once in a while, corners that line up, but mostly ragged edges; and always the cover of law just loosely attached to the jumbled world of material things. For all we know, most of what occurs in nature occurs by hap, subject to no law at all. What happens is more like an outcome of negotiation between domains than the logical consequence of a system of order." (The Dappled World, p. 1)
A world as far removed from Platonic logos as one can imagine.
Ah. It's all mere bricolage. The political agenda shows itself.
What is the political agenda associated with StreetlightX's view?
That doesn't explain much, but that's ok. We can leave it at that.
Both left and right like to make their own readings of naturalism. And nature itself gets obscured in the process.
I remember that discussion! Glad you found it useful.
If I recall correctly the point was that potential energy is no more than a convenient way to balance the books. There are plenty of other examples of such creative accounting.
No, it doesn't - it's a completely empty set of words used by simpletons and dimwtis, so much so that one can predict exactly when and where it gets wheeled out. Especially by those with a proven track record of limited vocabulary.
Quoting Banno
Yeah, I was profoundly bothered by it at the time, but it nagged at me and it's helped me to think certain things through more clearly.
I wonder the same things. Admittedly, before one even decides weither there are Laws of Nature or there are not, the content of those laws cannot be presupposed. Maybe they are the most Pomo Neo-Marxist Laws there's even been, or maybe they are a fascist's domination society wetdream...
On the other hand, I can only encourage anyone who, like SLX, denounces the abuse of the terms of Law and legal usage in philosophy and science. As my initial interest in philosophy was Philosophy of Law, I am expectedly very sensitive to the quick recourse to legal terminology in philosophy.
The worse aspect of which being, of course, that whenever a philosopher requisition the use of legal terminology in a philosophical argument, he very rarely does so without committing a serious category mistake. The latest anti-abortion thread gave a very evident exemple of this : the pro-lifer's claim that "abortion is murder". By which, they mean, abortion is wrong, and should be treated legally as murder, but since murder is a legal term before it is a moral one (in fact, there are probably no other domain of discourse that have generated quite as many general usage terms than the Law : tolerance, prescription, hell, even pontificate!), all the pro-lifer does in shouting "abortion is murder" is setting himself up for the quickest technical shutdown there can be.
Now those moralists could very well claim that Law and Morality are correlated, something which would be outside the aim of this thread to contemplate. My own position is that the recourse to correlate the domains of morality and legality is almost always unjustified. If that is the case, quite obviously, then I'm even more ready to denounce the move to irremediably link the legal domain and the scientific domain.
And this link is quite tenuous. It relies on a truncated and outdated notion of Law as the Sovereign's edicts (in this case, a barely concealed theologist throwback), for which Austin has already been duly criticised for. As Hart demonstrated, the Law is not in anyway similar to the immutable orders of an all powerful Sovereign, no more than it is similar to the relation established between a gun-toting bank robber and those he orders to give up their belongings.
The abuse of law by "science" and philosophy of nature is rather infertile, too. The analogy only seem to work so far as we limits ourselves to the axiomatic character of the Law. What's the route of appeal for science? What are the rules of recognitions? The contractual laws of science? What about the initial conditions of the Universe qualifies as Laws? Because they are set in stone, so to speak? But then the past would always have the value of Law!
The external recourse to legality is almost always (if I were less prudent, I would say always) an abuse motivated by the need to inject morality or the possibility of a moral stand in regards to the object of the discourse. This is even more tragic since the Law is almost always unable to perform this injection by itself.
So as I have argued, the emergent law approach taken by Peirce would see contextuality as irreducible. Thus it is certainly right to point this out about any claims which might portray micro-physical laws as themselves basic rather than emergent.
The usual view is that physics must find something definite, crisp, determinate, atomistic, once it drills down to the bedrock of existence. This is why the micro-physical laws are taken to describe something substantially real while the macro-physical laws - like the second law of thermodynamics in particular - are dismissed as merely emergent in the sense of being descriptive illusions. A way of summing over the fine detail as a convenience.
But the view Smolin is expressing - which Peirce made much more clearly a 100 years earlier - is that even the micro-physical would be emergent. The micro-physical realm gains its atomism, its definiteness, due to the downwardly-stabilising action of a weight of global constraints. The micro-physical is pure fluctuation, pure quantum possibility, shaped up into actual substantial events that can then go on to weave a classical world unfolding in a global dimension of time.
So yes. The way our fundamental micro-physical laws get formed just paints right over the fact that there has to be some story of development already. Smolin points that out. However that just says it is contextuality or constraints all the way down. Both the local and the global scales of the Cosmos are emergent. That is the whole point - how you can get something out of "nothing". The local and the global stand mutually or synergistically as each other's ground. Each is producing the other - the dialectical other that it itself needs to have there as the causal source of its own definite being.
This is why Peircean metaphysics is triadic. In the beginning is just Firstness or Vagueness. Then this potential splits - the symmetry breaks - in local~global fashion. You get the two varieties of causality emerging - bottom-up construction and top-down constraint. The outcome is a hierarchical situation - a fundamental asymmetry - that then goes to equilibrium over all its spatiotemporal scales of integration.
Check out this paper which looks at how Peirce relates to Smolin...
SPACE, TIME AND NATURAL LAW: A PEIRCEAN LOOK AT SMOLIN’S TEMPORAL NATURALISM
https://proyectoscio.ucv.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/A7-Waal.pdf
In the good old days, morality was based on what God told you in chiselled stone tablets or magic books. These days, people find support for the fundamental rightness of their socio-political views in what science might tell us about nature.
The right are as bad as the left, as I say. And SX is very good at criticising the right wing agenda as it shows itself in the Darwinian justifications for capitalism and neo-liberalism, or the racism of facism. I'm just pointing out that PoMo has a long social history of batting for the other side.
If the "laws" of nature are merely a social construction, a convenient illusion we project on to a bricolage of individuated histories, then this would give a metaphysical-strength justification for a politics of PC pluralism.
If Nature itself is a loose and collegial network of différance - it rejects hierarchical organisation, power structures, homogeneity, causal determinism, at root - then who are we humans to think otherwise about what is right and proper when it comes to our political relations? Listen to Nature! She has already spoken.
To be fair, I don't think the use of legal terminology in philosophy or science is a priori suspect, only that, when and where it it used, it is used with caution, or at the very least close attention to the specificity of that use. In fact one of the things I liked about Cartwright's quote that I cited in the OP is that she argues that 'laws of nature' are more like 'human' laws and not less: they bear upon very specific situations, and for most action and behavior, the law(s) simply have nothing to say. That said, I share your suspicion regarding such uses in general.
And most of Apo's gaseous output here can be dismissed as irrelevant insofar as his usual second grade comprehension ability leads him to think that a discussion of the scope of laws is a discussion about their modal status.
I think that's a myopic vision of laws. Law can be exactly as extensive as the Legislator wishes it to be. And by design, it is only through it's own exercise that it can limit its extent. As Aristotle said, everything is political, but as we Modern should be quick to add ; but the Law can decide that something is no longer political.
There are laws which give context to just about every possible social interactions of subjects in a society under the Rule of Law : constitutional laws. Of course, the level of abstraction of these laws to individual situation makes it nearly impossible to recognize their influence if you are not specifically looking out for these relations. These are not explicitely rules or orders or commands, but rather acts of empowerement on a circumscribed domain of action. There are no special constitutional Laws of Nature, or perhaps, the things we call Laws of Nature can only be so by analogy to constitutional law.
There are no Legislator to science, who can arbitrarily decide the extent of a totalitarian science and what is and isn't an object of science.
There is no systematic valence to individual states of Nature ; as such, what scientific situation should become the object of a law, and which shouldn't?
I don't see the point. "PC pluralism" has on it's side Existentialism and, and this may be a bit chauvin, the non-negligible advantage of being the only non-douchebag game in town, so to speak.
Can be, but usually aren't, unless you're in Stalinist Russia. It's pretty simple: do IR laws cover each and every aspect of what happens between employers and employees? No. They lay down constraints, boundaries, beyond which one cannot cross. Anything inside those boundaries are fair game. That's the import of the comparison.
Yeah. Anyone not standing alongside you is a douchebag. Skillfully argued.
The background to this thread was SX promising to show how the enemies of the left misuse the concepts of evolution to serve their political agendas.
Well great. It's very true. But now he is wheeling out Cartwright to give his own politicised reading of the metaphysics. I find that amusing.
You have, if nothing else - perhaps and especially because nothing else - a vivid imagination.
What else can reason besides organisms? Computers?
What is reasoning?
Your excuse in not answering the questions is pathetic. That is how you always take your way out of a question you just can't answer without being contradictory. Its getting old.
Computers are not organisms. I asked if they can reason. You are making up shit in order to avoid answering tough questions.
I have learned to not expect any meaningful answers to tough questions from you. I ask simply to show others that you can't answer them.
It's not the object of this thread to argue weither or not "PC pluralism" or "Pomo Neo-Marxist hermeneutics" are justified by SLX's attack on the concept of Laws of Nature. At least it does not seem so to me. It seems that rather that it is a criticism of the concept of Law in regards to the domain of natural philosophy or even just Nature itself, a qualification of how should be understood the extension of these Laws of Natures. If this ends up being an argument against a specific social discourse, it can only be by inference that this special discourse bases itself entirely on justifications by Laws of Nature. I will admit that I would find such an ideology repulsive almost entirely on aesthetical grounds alone, although I would not have much of an issue developping an argument to expand on this disgust.
As such, I would say my expression, although perhaps a bit crude, does stand. Had SLX decided to provide a justification for a socio-political vision of science, I would have found the argument strange, if only because it seems rather self-defeating to justify "Pomo Neo-Marxism French Theory PC Pluralism" or whatever, on the basis of a metaphysical discourse. Its otiose. Rather, you demonstrate that every single other system stands on an uncriticised metaphysical discourse, and then show that, as I said, your game is the only left in town.
But, seemingly, from all accounts but yours, this is not SLX's intent.
I guess I’ll just have to live with that, Harry.
That's your problem. You don't want to change or learn anything. You just want to keep beleiving what you believe.
What is learning? What learns? What does it mean to learn something useful as opposed to something not useful? What is useful knowledge as opposed to unuseful knowledge?
I understand philosophy all to well (at least the kind used here on these forums by many of the posters, like yourself and SX). It is the act of being artful with words, not a logical use of words.
Quoting WayfarerYou'd think that me asking what reasoning is is asking what the spectacles are. What are the spectacles, Wayfarer?
Random ramblings :
"Well-regulated" may, in a vacuum, refer to the extension of laws covering the specific situation, but it may also have a more mechanical usage of "efficient", "without operating deviations", so to speak.
Both meanings are applicable to the philosophical inquiry at hand.
As SLX correctly pointed out, only a few jurisdictions have such an extensive body of laws that one could be tempted to say the the legal system, in such a jurisdication, is totalitarian. More often, only social situations which are very common or very risky have their own legal specificities. However, it seems a priori correct to apply at least one meaning of the term "well-regulated" to both a society which does not have an totalitarian legal system, but in which the majority of social situations are resolved within acceptable parameters, and to a society which does have a totalitarian legal system but which is constantly encountering critical failures, so to speak.
"Regulation" here becomes suspect. Where, in the totalitarian version of Laws of Nature are we presented with an account of systematic critical failures?
Thank you for reading what I've actually written, rather than childishly fantasizing about projected 'ideologies' and 'political agendas'.
Quoting Akanthinos
In this context it'd be the former sense of the phrase that's under consideration.
I agree, in the context of your OP, that is clear. :wink:
My previous ramblings are only train-of-thoughts on what I perceive to be, perhaps, a semantic shifting ground which reinforce the impression that the application of the term is, at all, appropriate.
And perhaps should we not simply stabilize the usage of the term to resolve the issue of your OP? If Nature is not a stress-free system, not a place of well-regulated common practices repeated over and over again, as, it seems to me, all evidence should point to, then should we not agree that neither one or the other meaning of the term applies to it? That, rather, our opinion of the universe's process stability is a function of our position within it?
True, true, but it's important to be precise: if we admit both senses, to the degree that nature is not 'well-regulated' in the 2nd sense ('efficient'), it is because it is not well-regulated in the 1st sense ('extension'). There's a logical priority here which one must be careful to attend to.
Ah! Agreed, and well put.
I'm still thinking about the negativity of what we can call natural laws. I'll get back to you on this one. I have to babysit an anxiety-ridden doberman that could well enough murder me in my sleep. :worry:
I was thinking about this too, and especially the curious idea - let me know if you agree - that even positive injunctions in the law are, in a way, simply double negatives. As in, if there's a law that says 'you must drive on the left side of the road', what's 'really' going on is an injunction to the effect of 'you must not not drive on the left side of the road'. Or in more general terms, everything that counts as 'legal' is in fact simply not-illegal. And good luck with the doberman lol.
The problem is that physics never does drill down to the bedrock of existence. Metaphysics and ontological speculation, propose some principles of existence, that's what does the drilling, and physics may take some of these for granted, as the "bedrock". But all the experiments by which physics purports to prove these principles as general "laws" are very restrictive and cannot support the claim to universality of the principles.
Quoting apokrisis
The "micro-physical" suffers from the exact same issue as the "macro-physical", in the inverse way. The human perspective is in the midrange so any extrapolation in either direction produces an approximation. So any claim that laws applied to the micro represent what is real, is just as mistaken as any claim that laws applied to the macro represent what is real.
The issue is not "the emergence of laws", as if "laws" are some sort of entity which come into existence, and are responsible for creating stability through placing constraints on physical reality. The issue is the limitations in the human capacity to create laws which have universal applicability.
To the extent that the positions that are being attacked are not vague generalities, here is what I can make out:
1. As a preliminary observation, what is meant by "laws of nature" in this context are specific statements, rules, equations that have traditionally been so called. So Newton's Law of gravitation is one such law.
2. And the criticism seems to come down to this: No one law of nature specifies the behavior of everything, ever, in all domains and all contexts.
Well, duh? How is that a criticism? Yes, a scientific "law" usually describes a particular regularity in a prescribed context and against the background of a specific theoretical framework. Or even just one principal component of what may be a superposition of regularities. How is that controversial?
Also, to better understand where Cartwright is coming from, it would help to note that she belongs to a powers/capacities/dispositions school of thought as regards causation. Things exercise their natural capacities in certain circumstances, and that is how everything happens in nature. You can see how the view of the "dappled world" comes about. While every given thing has a specific nature, a world filled with a bunch of different things with no overriding organizing principle (since all principles are local and attached to particular things), on the whole it's going to look "dappled."
There is a wide variety of views on causation, and no one of them dominates - indeed, different views do not necessarily exclude each other. I lean more towards causal pluralism myself (which Cartwright also advocates), but the powers-capacities view is perhaps my least favorite. It has a homely, intuitive appeal, but as an analytical tool I think it is very limited, and science does not sit well with it.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03081079.2012.689466?needAccess=true
Any takers? We'd get to learn some category theory!
Howard Pattee did this nice critique of how Rosen turned overly Platonic and mathematical in his last work...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5891221_Laws_Constraints_and_the_Modeling_Relation_-_History_and_Interpretations
The interesting question here might be whether it matters that the measurement process is itself informal - something quite apart from the formal model of causal entailment that is the law-expressing theory.
So as a necessity of the modelling relation, the act of measurement (the encoding/decoding) is some kind of purpose-laden and pragmatic exercise in constraining the physics of the system in question so that it yields some number or value or sign. It is a fundamentally free action - a choice the modeller can make - in contrast to the modeller's representation of the world with a theory that is then utterly constrained, lawful, algorithmic and deterministic.
So on the one hand, category theory might allow a representation of this relation - the way the modeller does pragmatically map algorithmic descriptions to a non-algorithmic reality. But then the connection between the map and the territory depends on this fundamentally informal and unconstrained business of measurement.
In practice, habits of measurement are in fact constrained by the fact that they must work to achieve some goal or finality that the modelling relation represents. Measurement may have complete freedom, in contrast to the model's complete formality, yet the further thing of a purpose is used to prune the excessive degrees of freedom.
However that is then an unmodelled real-world physical issue that an overly mathematical or formal approach to the story fundamentally fails to pick up. Any use of category theory couldn't actually deliver the kind of purely mathematical relational biology that was Rosen's ultimate goal.
Again it is the usual central issue of ontology. We struggle to find a story that deals with the observers along with the observables.
But as Pattee outlines, the modelling relation itself is very good for making it clear just where "laws" fit into things. They are the way we can see nature as if it were a mechanical reality implementing a formal system of causal entailment. And then the informal measurement side of the business - the encoding/decoding - is where the issue of the observer with a purpose can get buried safely as everything that really needs to be said about a pragmatic semiotic habit.
The laws themselves are absolved of carrying the burden of telling the ontological truth. They become mere algorithms. The non-formalised part of the business is then our capacity not to feed garbage input into them, and also to recognise when the output might be obvious garbage.
Do you have to drive a stake through its heart first, just to be sure?
Constraints are apophatic in this fashion. Only that which could be predicted can also be forbidden. So possibilities could be ruled out as picked-out individual cases, yet nature can continue to be fundamentally surprising or probabilistic.
The deepest physical laws look to capture mathematical symmetries. This is in fact a theorem - Noether's theorem.
All the conservation laws that have allowed us to describe the Cosmos as a closed and coherent system - a Universe - derive directly from symmetry principles. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy. Space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum. Rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum.
So this puts paid to the social constructionist angle that our laws of nature are some kind of pluralist bricolage.
In the end, Nature seems to have had no choice about the fact that - if it is to exist - it must be shaped by these mathematical-strength "laws".
Of course, the interesting thing is that the closure that is necessary for there to be a generalised state of Being is now likely to be emergent rather than fundamental. On the microscale, quantum mechanics shows that things aren't exactly closed and conserved – at least not in unambiguous fashion.
So yeah, symmetry is the ideal limit state description. A story of effective laws. Yet still, as a finality, those symmetries are the inescapable destination of any evolution of a state of Being.
The idea that the laws of nature are some kind of psychological convenience has to deal with the hard facts here.
Noether's theorem can be rephrased with no mentions of laws : "If a system has a continuous symmetry property, then there are corresponding quantities whose values are conserved in time."
Scientists would elevate it to a principle of nature rather than merely a law of nature I guess. :razz:
A rule isn't a law.
A theorem isn't a law.
A constant isn't a law.
An algorithm isn't a law.
Take your pick.
Depends on your interpretation of the terms...any of them could be thought of as a law, or at least to entail or imply a law.
The ontological issue I am then highlighting is that our efforts to define the laws/principles of nature are targeting something real, even if that reality is emergent. There are forms of organisation that are mathematically inevitable - even from locally random action - and so the Laws of Nature can't be treated as some kind of socially constructed bricolage.
(And the same argument could apply to actual human constitutional laws - are they just a bunch of arbitrary social conventions or do they ultimately target something that is fundamental by way of "natural justice" and "human rights"?)
Anyway, that leaves three views in play concerning the Laws of Nature.
1) The laws are some kind of mysterious thing - the handiwork of God perhaps - that were written into the Creation of the Universe and determine the course of all physical action in some transcendent fashion.
2) The laws are descriptions we freely invent that somehow both account for events in ways that are remarkably effective and yet also somehow have no particular claim to being "the truth" of reality. They never become more than social constructions.
3) The laws are historically emerging constraints on free action in the Cosmos. They are the global regularities that emerge to regulate the dynamics of events. Information accumulates to create general contexts that give every action a common direction. And while the development of these regularities might be "random" on the individual scale, statistically they must evolve towards equilibrium balances. So "laws" - expressing the symmetries broken, and the symmetries arrived at - exist as mathematical-strength inevitabilities of that very process of evolving. There is nothing contingent about the ultimate outcomes of collective random action. Everything gets channelled into the common probabilistic "flow" which we describe as "lawful".
I should be addressing these points to the OP of course. So SX correctly quoted this...
Quoting StreetlightX
But then science moved on to think in terms of more global symmetry principles. Instead of leaving things where they might well seem some bricolage of local heuristics speaking to no universal hand, science rewrote Newtonian mechanics in terms of Lagrangians and Hamiltonians. Symmetry, and symmetry-breaking, became the general story holding all "laws" together in a constitutional framework.
The terminology did switch from laws to principles - in particular, when it comes to dynamics, the principle of least action. An evolutionary ontology became wired in because the most general constraint is that everything should happen by using the shortest path available. Essentially nature is free to take any path to an outcome. And then, because all those paths are in competition, the optimum path is the one that - on the probabilistic whole - is going to be the one that emerges from the fray.
So while to all outward appearances, science seemed to talk of externally-imposed and hence mysteriously transcendent laws, all the actual practice of formulating laws had switched to one based on notions of emergent, historically-conditioned, constraints.
Hence my complaint about the political tenor of the OP. It is easy to attack "the laws of nature" when they are presented in a strawman fashion. The "Newtonian" idea of "laws" falls apart fast under any examination. But that doesn't then make this social constructionist/bricolage rhetoric of Cartwright - or those employing her here - any more correct.
The truth of things is more interesting. Global regularities are emergent, but mathematically-inevitable, constraints on action. The Universe has a complex constitution due to a series of symmetry-breakings that have left it increasingly more organised in a hierarchical fashion. And this is a structure of "law" that science can target in legitimate fashion. In the end, there could be only the one answer in terms of "what exists".
And for philosophy generally, this is important. As said, it ought to impact on even our human debates about politics and morality. For instance, the arguments of evolutionary psychology couldn't simply be dismissed out of hand.
Existentialism has been very vocal about this.
Funny. I see them as diametrically opposite. One is about immanence and causal emergence, the other is about transcendence and causal mystery.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well they are opposing metaphysics that target the same observables. They are related in that each has to explain the same recalcitrant realities. And perhaps both also share the anti-nominalistic view about the "hard reality" of these causal entities.
The jargon used ought to reflect these distinctions in my view. But in a general way, we are all talking about what folk mean by the Cosmos appearing to have mathematical-strength regularities.
I mean even "emergence" means very different things to the reductionist/nominalist and the holist/realist here. There is a bit of a verbal minefield to pick through. So I'm not wanting to get too hung up calling laws "laws". That's only the start of the disagreements. :)
Quoting Wayfarer
But that is just you expressing your political agenda here.
I'm not say that I don't have an agenda. I speak for natural philosophy. However I think I can point to the way science has actually unfolded as the best support for my metaphysics. A process or systems view has worked.
And my emergent constraints approach has the advantage that there is no causal mystery. It appeals to collective or statistical behaviour. And our mathematical models of those explain why the patterns have no choice but to arise.