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Full Idea
The statement "all gold cubes are smaller than one cubic mile" seems to have all the features demanded of a lawlike statement, yet it can hardly be said to express a law. It is a merely true universal generalisation.
Gist of Idea
"All gold cubes are smaller than one cubic mile" is a true universal generalisation, but not a law
Source
Stathis Psillos (Causation and Explanation [2002], §5.3)
Book Ref
Psillos,Stathis: 'Causation and Explanation' [Acumen 2002], p.141
A Reaction
Nice example. A trickier case is "all cubes of uranium are smaller than one cubic mile", which sounds like part of a law. It suggests a blurred borderline between the two. How much gold is there in the universe? Is that fact a natural necessity?
| 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] |