Psychology Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Laws: A. Laws are rules created and enforced by governments to regulate behavior, protect people's rights, and promote order and justice in society. - B. Laws of nature are fundamental principles that describe how the universe works. They are universal and unchanging. - C. The status of laws in the individual sciences is controversial, since they may only describe regularities. See also Natural laws, Regularities, Principles._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Nelson Goodman on Laws - Dictionary of Arguments
I 39 ~ Law/invent/discover/Goodman: to the discovery of laws, belongs to design them. >Discoveries. --- II 37 E.g. ... because he describes a random fact and there is no law. And apparently also no purely syntactic criterion can be useful, because the most specific description of individual facts can be brought into a form that has any desired degree of syntactic generality. II 38 I just want to emphasize the thought by Hume that a sentence is not used for predictions because it is a law, but that it is called a law, because it is used for predictions. And that the law is not used for predictions, because it describes a causal connection, but that the meaning of the causal connection is to explain by the help of laws for predictions. >Predictions. II 40f Definition Act (wrong): a law is a sentence that is lawlike and true - but a sentence can be true but not lawlike, or lawlike and not true. For this definition lawlikeness would be a short-lived and random affair. Only sentences that you actually use for predictions, would be lawlike. And a true sentence which has been used for predictions, would be no law anymore if it had once been fully examined. II 41 Lawlike/Goodman: a sentence is lawlike if its recognition does not depend on the decision of any given application case alone. II 41 Sensible is that there schould be no application case on which test the recognition depends on. This criterion does not allow statements like "This book is black and oranges are round" to be lawlike because their recognition is subject to the knowledge, if this book is black. II 109 Lawlike or resumable hypotheses are not to be characterized in a purely syntactic way. >Hypotheses. II 114 If all application cases are examined, there is no hypothesis or law anymore. II 114 The hypothesis neither needs to be true nor false, nor lawlike or even just reasonable, because we do not speak of what should be continued, but what is actually continued. Wrong hypotheses can be supported._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
G IV N. Goodman Catherine Z. Elgin Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences, Indianapolis 1988 German Edition: Revisionen Frankfurt 1989 Goodman I N. Goodman Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis/Cambridge 1978 German Edition: Weisen der Welterzeugung Frankfurt 1984 Goodman II N. Goodman Fact, Fiction and Forecast, New York 1982 German Edition: Tatsache Fiktion Voraussage Frankfurt 1988 Goodman III N. Goodman Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis 1976 German Edition: Sprachen der Kunst Frankfurt 1997 |
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