Abstract
Many philosophers have believed that the laws of nature differ from the accidental truths in their invariance under counterfactual perturbations. Roughly speaking, the laws would still have held had q been the case, for any q that is consistent with the laws. (Trivially, no accident would still have held under every such counterfactual supposition.) The main problem with this slogan (even if it is true) is that it uses the laws themselves to delimit q’s range. I present a means of distinguishing the laws (and their logical consequences) from the accidents, in terms of their range of invariance under counterfactual antecedents, that does not appeal to physical modalities (or any cognate notion) in delimiting the relevant range of counterfactual perturbations. I then argue that this approach explicates the sense in which the laws possess a kind of necessity.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
G. B. Airy (1830) ArticleTitle‘On Certain Conditions Under Which A Perpetual Motion Is Possible’ Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 3 369–372
R. Chisholm (1946) ArticleTitle‘The Contrary-to-Fact Conditional’ Mind 55 289–307
N. Cumins (1993) What If the Moon Didn’t Exist: Voyages to Earths That Might Have Been Harper New York
N. Goodman (1947) ArticleTitle‘The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals’ The Journal of Philosophy 44 113–128
M. Lange (1994) ArticleTitle‘Scientific Realism and Components: The Case of Classical Astronomy’ The Monist 74 111–127
M. Lange (1996) ArticleTitle‘Laws of Nature, Cosmic Coincidences, and Scientific Realism’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 614–638
M. Lange (2000) Natural Laws in Scientific Practice Oxford University Press New York
M. Lange (2004) ArticleTitle‘The Autonomy of Functional Biology: A Reply to Rosenberg’ Biology & Philosophy 19 93–101
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lange, M. laws and their stability. Synthese 144, 415–432 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-5874-1
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-5874-1