Perhaps I should consider myself lucky I have a sketchy grounding in formal logic. — Janus

Correct. I had a shudder at the mention of Tooley and Sosa’s Causation. Made me think how lucky I was to have an instinctive aversion to reductionism from as early as I remember. :grin:

:up:

But are laws of nature not codifications of observed invariances? — Janus

No. The hypothesis I discussed is that laws of nature are ontological.

I distinguish laws of nature from so-called "laws of physics". These are, at worst, codifications of these invariances. But they are more than that. when they make predictions that are later confirmed, predictions about things not previously observed. These give us good reasons to think the law of physics may be a true law of nature.

But it still may be they later become falsified by new evidence. This only means the law of physics isn't an accurate description of the ontological law of nature. .

Am I to understand that you are saying the laws of nature are not merely codifications of natural invariances and their attributes, but are the invariances themselves?

For example, would you say the law of gravity is not merely a codification of the apparent spatiotemporal universality of gravitational effects, but the gravitational effects themselves, along with their mathematically quantifiable attributes?

That's pretty much correct.