Laws of nature: metaphysics and epistemology

Abstract

The debate on the metaphysics of laws of nature is one of the many disputes in the metaphysics of science that emerged in the lasts decades of the 20th century. It is historically rooted in the discussions on the role of Divine will in the governance of natural phenomena, held during the 16th to 18th centuries. However, its most immediate antecedent is a pressing point in the agenda of the Received View: the task of settling a distinction between authentic scientific laws and mere accidentally true generalizations. In this context the discussion was mainly about the logical, semantic and syntactic properties of lawlike statements that could underpin the distinction. Conversely, the current debate on the metaphysics of laws presupposes that mere linguistic or logical considerations are insufficient to draw that distinction and something else is needed. That something else is frequently a feature of the world that falls under the domain of metaphysics, a law of nature, as opposed to a scientific lawlike statement. Not every position in the debate would happily admit that laws are something in the world, but all of them agree on the fact that some metaphysical theorization about the world's structure is needed in order to settle the distinction between laws and non-laws.