display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
5 ideas
| 17633 | The law of gravity has many consequences beyond its grounding observations [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The law of gravitation leads to many consequences which could not be discovered merely from the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Regressive Method for Premises in Mathematics [1907], p.275) |
| 8379 | In causal laws, 'events' must recur, so they have to be universals, not particulars [Russell] |
| Full Idea: An 'event' (in a statement of the 'law of causation') is intended to be something that is likely to recur, since otherwise the law becomes trivial. It follows that an 'event' is not some particular, but a universal of which there may be many instances. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (On the Notion of Cause [1912], p.179) | |
| A reaction: I am very struck by this. It may be a key insight into understanding what a law of nature actually is. It doesn't follow that we must be realists about universals, but the process of abstraction from particulars is at the heart of generalisation. |
| 8381 | The constancy of scientific laws rests on differential equations, not on cause and effect [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is not in the sameness of causes and effects that the constancy of scientific law consists, but in sameness of relations. And even 'sameness of relations' is too simple a phrase; 'sameness of differential equations' is the only correct phrase. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (On the Notion of Cause [1912], p.186) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a commitment to the regularity view, since there is nothing more to natural law than that the variables keeping obeying the equations. It also seems to be a very instrumentalist view. |
| 14174 | The laws of motion and gravitation are just parts of the definition of a kind of matter [Russell] |
| Full Idea: For us, as pure mathematicians, the laws of motion and the law of gravitation are not properly laws at all, but parts of the definition of a certain kind of matter. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], §459) | |
| A reaction: The 'certain kind of matter' is that which has 'mass'. Since these are paradigm cases of supposed laws, this is the beginning of the end for real laws of nature, and good riddance say I. See Mumford on this. |
| 5393 | We can't know that our laws are exceptionless, or even that there are any laws [Russell] |
| Full Idea: If some law which has no exceptions applies to a case, we can never be sure that we have discovered that law and not one to which there are exceptions; also the reign of law would seem to be itself only probable. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: None of this can be denied. In modern physics, several supposed laws have come up for question. Is the proton stable? Are the gravitational constant or the speed of light necessarily fixed? Russell is doing epistemology. How do we conceive the laws? |