What Price Changing Laws of Nature?
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(2021) 11:12
PAPER IN GENERAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
What Price Changing Laws of Nature? Olivier Sartenaer 1 & Alexandre Guay 1 & Paul Humphreys 2 Received: 10 February 2020 / Accepted: 26 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this paper, we show that it is not a conceptual truth about laws of nature that they are immutable (though we are happy to leave it as an open empirical question whether they do actually change once in a while). In order to do so, we survey three popular accounts of lawhood—(Armstrong-style) necessitarianism, (Bird-style) dispositionalism and (Lewis-style) ‘best system analysis’—and expose the extent, as well as the philosophical cost, of the amendments that should be enforced in order to leave room for the possibility of changing laws. Keywords Law of nature . Change in law . Necessitarianism . Dispositionalism .
Humeanism
1 Introduction ‘They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold onto that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s centre.’ (George Orwell, 1984) Cynics sometimes have it that philosophical statements are either truistic or false. In this paper—and perhaps in a way that would conveniently put us in the good graces of Orwell’s Thinkpol—we show that it is not a conceptual truth about laws that they are immutable. As relatively uncynical philosophers, though, we are happy to leave it as an open empirical question whether they do actually change once in a while. * Olivier Sartenaer [email protected]
1
Institut supérieur de Philosophie, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
2
Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
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European Journal for Philosophy of Science
(2021) 11:12
Apart from some exceptions (Poincaré 1911; Whitehead 1933; or, more recently, Balashov 1992; Shimony 1999; Lange 2009; Tahko 2015), the well-entrenched assumption that laws of nature are necessarily immutable has been seldom critically put into question. Yet, besides these philosophers’ moral right to speculate off the beaten path, such an assumption has been challenged to different extents by practicing scientists (see, e.g., Dirac 1937; or, more recently, Smolin 2015). Though most of the time it is not perfectly clear what those scientists might exactly be committed to when they are claiming that laws of nature ‘change’ or ‘evolve’, the very fact that they happen to take this idea seriously—in spite of its controversial flavor—certainly is an indication that some philosophical work deserves to be done. Obviously, whether or not laws of nature can change, as well as how precisely they may come to do that—if they do it at all—crucially depends on what the concept of ‘law of nature’ is taken to refer to, that is to say, what philosophical account of lawhood one holds dear. This relatively bland observation renders our already delicate endea
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