No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Rigorous Regularism: Physical Laws Without Necessity*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
This is a book about laws. Not, however, about the laws of which we learned in science classes at school: “scientific laws”. It is rather about those universalities which govern the world of facts, what Swartz calls “physical laws”—although this language is slightly misleading because the term is intended to cover the living as well as the non-living world. Of course, it may well be that a scientific law (like Boyle's law) does capture the essence of a physical law, but not necessarily or (apparently) usually. A physical law by definition can never be false, whereas (as Michael Scriven pointed out some years ago) almost paradoxically nearly all (if not all) scientific laws are false.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1988 , pp. 523 - 528
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1988
References
1 Mackie, J., Hume's Moral Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).Google Scholar