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Full Idea
Rather than a sentence being used for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction.
Gist of Idea
We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them
Source
Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954], p.21), quoted by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §5.4
Book Ref
Psillos,Stathis: 'Causation and Explanation' [Acumen 2002], p.142
A Reaction
This smacks of dodgy pragmatism, and sounds deeply wrong. The perception of a law has to be prior to making the prediction. Why do we make the prediction, if we haven't spotted a law. Goodman is mesmerised by language instead of reality.
| 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] |