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Full Idea
The laws of nature must be supposed to be just descriptions of the ways in which things are intrinsically disposed to behave: of how they would behave if they existed as closed and isolated systems.
Gist of Idea
Laws of nature are just descriptions of how things are disposed to behave
Source
Brian Ellis (The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism [2009], 3)
Book Ref
Ellis,Brian: 'The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism' [Acument 2009], p.54
A Reaction
I agree with this, and therefore take 'laws of nature' to be eliminable from any plausible ontology (which just contains the things and their behaviour). Ellis tends to defend laws, when he doesn't need to.
| 4794 | We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them [Goodman] |
| 17670 | Newton's First Law refers to bodies not acted upon by a force, but there may be no such body [Armstrong] |
| 12675 | Laws of nature are just descriptions of how things are disposed to behave [Ellis] |
| 15799 | Lawlike sentences are general attributions of disposition to all members of some class [Fetzer] |
| 4800 | Natural laws result from eliminative induction, where enumerative induction gives generalisations [Cohen,LJ, by Psillos] |
| 14339 | Without laws, how can a dispositionalist explain general behaviour within kinds? [Mumford] |
| 4793 | "All gold cubes are smaller than one cubic mile" is a true universal generalisation, but not a law [Psillos] |
| 14382 | Pragmatic laws allow prediction and explanation, to the extent that reality is stable [Leuridan] |