What you are saying amounts to having to decide if an "accurate description" is to be found in the theory or its measurements? — apokrisis

Not at all. What I'm saying amounts to: pay attention to how we use language, and specifically the varying or non-univocal motivations behinds those uses. Nothing more, nothing less.

On the other hand, it is not true that F=ma accurately and precisely describes the behaviour of most moving bodies. — StreetlightX

It is nevertheless the case that without the knowledge of Newtonian physics, and later Einstein's theory of relativity, that satellites could not be maneuvered into orbit or land on Mars. And they enable such operations with great precision.

The first paper I encountered of Cartwright's was No God, No Laws, (courtesy of McDoodle some time back). It struck me as a sensible piece of work, but hardly earth-shattering. The main claim seems to be, that we can no longer envisage natural laws as behaving as a cause, something that compels a particular outcome. This is predicated on the argument that the idea of 'law' was originally theistic, so that 'nature's laws' were then analogies for divine command. So if one doesn't assume that there is a deity to underwrite those laws, and of course naturalists generally don't, then the very idea of 'law' is called into question, so the metaphor is no longer instructive.

I think the actual issue is something else altogether; that science, when it was 'natural philosophy', assumed that the regularities of nature were indeed 'God's handiwork'. Now, however, having dispensed with God, then they need to be accounted for in some other terms. But the question I would ask is: why presume that science can, or should, explain these regularities. After all, one is able to do considerable work on the basis of simply knowing what they are. It seems to me that a good deal of the commentary around rationalising these laws is motivated by the 'god-shaped hole' that the absence of a creator has left; as if science ought to find it easy to step into the vacuum left by the discovery of the non-existence of God and come up with a 'turtles all the way down' solution, which is proving extraordinarily difficult.

But then, the fact that it's not so easy might actually say something.

And speaking of a 'Wittgensteinian take' on the question - there is an oft-quoted passage from TLP

6.371 At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

6.372 So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.

And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.

Psychological hedonism is definitely falsifiable — MonfortS26

I dare not ask how......

Also, how would this analysis fair when considering thermodynamics? I have in mind the 2nd law, in particular. It's extremely abstract, but doesn't really deal with entities as much (as I understand it), but does seem quite universal ((edit: I should use your terminology better. Not universal, but rather a cover-law)) in that it's often linked to the arrow of time. — Moliere

I used natural selection in my OP as an example of universal 'biological law' - all of biology is subject to it - which nonetheless does not shape all the minuate of biological existence. It is, as Apo says, a general law and not a particular one. The 2nd law actually provides another excellent example of this kind of universality as well: like natural selection, the 2nd law also exerts a kind of 'eliminative pressure': any system that is closed to incoming flows of energy will eventually find itself dissolute. But of course, there are heaps of things that are not theromydnamically closed (hurricanes, ecosystems, living things), and so are able to subsist in a 'metastable' state (a state other than that of the state of least energy):



On the face of it, these systems seem to violate the 2nd law, but they in fact do not. As the classic explanation goes, a local decrease in entropy is always 'paid for' by an increase in global entropy. The upshot is that the 2nd law, while never being violated, nonetheless - just like natural selection - remains 'blind' to a whole range of phenomena (so long as they don't fall below a certain input energy threshold; or, in the case of natural selection, so long as novel traits/changes in the environment do not make the species fall below a threshold of maladaptivity).

How would you differentiate entities from theories?

This is a complicated one, but the quick answer is that an entity is causative, while a theory is not. An entity is something that causes something to happen. The scientific anti-realist basically says that explanations are fine as explanations - they are organising elements for our understanding - but their truth is a whole other ball game, an 'extra ingredient'. Here, to quote again, is how Cartwright puts it:

"[Anti-realists] argue that explanation has truth going along with it only as an extra ingredient. But causal explanations have truth built into them. When I infer from an effect to a cause, I am asking what made the effect occur, what brought it about. No explanation of that sort explains at all unless it does present a cause; and in accepting such an explanation, I am accepting not only that it explains in the sense of organising and making plain, but also that it presents me with a cause.

My newly planted lemon tree is sick, the leaves yellowing and dropping off. I finally explain this by saying that water has accumulated in the base of the planter: the water is the cause of the disease. I drill a hole in the base of the oak barrel where the lemon tree lives, and foul water flows out. That was the cause. Before I had drilled the hole, I could still give the explanation and to give that explanation was to present the supposed cause, the water. There must be such water for the explanation to be correct. An explanation of an effect by a cause has an existential component, not just an optional extra ingredient. "

t seems to me that a good deal of the commentary around rationalising these laws is motivated by the 'god-shaped hole' that the absence of a creator has left; as if science ought to find it easy to step into the vacuum left by the discovery of the non-existence of God. — Wayfarer

I agree, which is why philosophers like Cartwright and physicists like Davis have argued that we either need to drop the reference to laws altogether, or radically revise - by way of deflating - our understanding of them, so as to better shed the dead theological skin in which they encase science. No God, No Laws is the paper I actually linked to in the OP, but another, perhaps more apposite one is Cartwright's "God’s order, man’s order and the order of Nature; [pdf]", in which she argues that biological laws are far better candidates for paradigms of scientific laws than are physical laws:

"Perhaps the traditional view of what counts as proper science with proper laws has been mistaken all along. Contemporary biology seems to have just what it takes to describe nature successfully and to put its knowledge to use ... Various authors conclude that rather than good old-fashioned proper laws biology offers instead: (1) laws that emerge historically, and (2) laws that are contingent. .... They also conclude that biology offers only (3) laws that are not exceptionless. Different kinds of cases lead others to propose that biology studies not laws that describe regular behavior that must occur, but rather mechanisms that, functioning properly and in the right places, can generate regular behavior."

I think these are all good moves, ones which sanction the fact that the 'fundamental laws' are, ironically, more exceptions than rules, limits cases and not paradigmatic ones. That the fundamental laws of physics are taken to be paradigmatic of science - and that people are so taken by promises of 'theories of everything' - speaks more to the vampirism and the hangover of unconscious and powerful religious impulses than it does about the real life practices of science.

What happens on most occasions is dictated by no law at all — StreetlightX

I thought we crossed that bridge a long time ago - the problem of induction.

The problem with Nancy Cartwright's outlook is that she's simply serving us old wine in a new bottle.

Science is fully cognizant of its limits and makes no claims of 100% certitude in its discoveries. However, notice how scientific theories are getting more and more precise over time. A good example would be Aristotle -> Newton -> Einstien. It's difficult to ignore a body of knowledge that increases its accuracy in making predictions.

Of course it's a possibility that these laws may not be inviolable but it's a fact that they haven't until now.

The problem of induction is another problem altogether and largely irrelevant to this discussion.

These senses of truth are not in contradiction, because they bear on different domains, or rather, they attempt to respond to different questions (It is an accurate description vs. Is the law otherwise than stated?). — StreetlightX

Right. So it comes down to asking the right questions to get the right explanation. Philosophy is rife with asking the wrong questions.

F=ma always works when trying to get at the relationship between force mass and acceleration. The formula is used in every NASA mission - most of which are successful. The letters are merely variables for numbers that change in every instance but the relationship always stays the same.

What is ironic is that the people making claims that laws and rules are untrue are themselves trying to establish laws and rules that are true by simply stating and objective facts as if they are true for everyone - that rules and laws are untrue.

Find a single example of motivation that isn't caused by pain or pleasure. This could be done through brain scans.

Brain scans are terrific for diagnosis of injury or illness, but they’ve got little to do with plumbing the answers to those kinds of questions. Have a read of this.

the 'fundamental laws' are, ironically, more exceptions than rules, limits cases and not paradigmatic ones. That the fundamental laws of physics are taken to be paradigmatic of science - and that people are so taken by promises of 'theories of everything' - speaks more to the vampirism and the hangover of unconscious and powerful religious impulses than it does about the real life practices of science. — StreetlightX

Again you go too far and try to assimilate philosophy of science to a social agenda. Let the facts speak for themselves here.

The fundamental laws are fundamental because they take us back to the beginning. If the Cosmos evolved, there has to have been an initial state of high symmetry that then became the current succession of increasingly broken symmetries.

So physics has found - as a central fact - that our Universe appeared in a "Big Bang" and is heading for a "Heat Death". All the individuation we see is the result of symmetries that got broken. These symmetries have the force of mathematical necessity. We found them first via mathematical reasoning. Later it was realised that Nature itself had to be bound by this principle of self-consistent intelligibility and a generalised least action principle.

If science thus fills a hole left by theistic metaphysics, it is because it has shown there was indeed a creation event that was deeply mathematical. The order we see could not have failed to be the case as the simplest form of order that could have developed.

Of course there are a lot of gaps in this story still. Ideally a theory of everything would be able to explain the value of all the initial conditions constants as mathematical necessities. The strengths of the various coupling forces are "accidents" so far as current understanding is concerned. But it is also reasonable speculation that those constants are also mathematically determined by the exact detail of complex symmetry breakings.

So really, scientific excitement about theories of everything which reveal existence to have inevitable mathematical-strength structure is not misplaced. Our descriptions of the fundamental structure of nature is quite the opposite of talk about exceptions. The ontic structure described in terms of symmetry models is as real and central as anything could be. With luck, we will find there could have only been only the one Cosmos at a fundamental level. And that would make it a univocal metaphysics in which exceptions become impossible.

Yes. That outcome might also delight those with a different social or philosophical agenda to your own. But so what?

Unless you believe scientific inquiry ought to be constrained by a quasi-political agenda - making things come out right for pluralism, social constructionism, political correctness, or whatever, at a fundamental physical level - then the science should be left to speak for its own metaphysics.

That physics should have discovered the Cosmos was in fact created, and that its development was already pre-ordained by mathematical-strength principles, is just something philosophy has to get used to.

It is not about filling a hole left by religion. It is about completing a metaphysical project initiated by the Ancient Greek metaphysicians even before the theocrats came along and started nicking their ideas in an attempt to legitimate their various brands of Church.

On the general issue of how to view laws, John Wheeler was articulating a quantum information approach very nicely back in the 1980s.

This is a good short paper - INFORMATION, PHYSICS, QUANTUM: THE SEARCH FOR LINKS
John Archibald Wheeler - http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf

And the longer version - https://what-buddha-said.net/library/pdfs/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf

The opening statement for instance...

“Every law of physics, pushed to the extreme, will be found to be statistical and approximate, not mathematically perfect and precise,”

So the tricky bit here is that an emergentist approach to physical reality must take a constraints-based approach where the Cosmos arises due to a suppression of its freedoms. This makes the Universe a fundamentally probabilistic exercise. If we zoom in on the "ground of being", we discover only increasingly uncertain fluctuations. There just isn't anything fixed and definite in the way that a story of eternal natural laws operating on fixed initial conditions would seem to demand.

So that appears to support SX's political desire for a PoMo metaphysics of radical contingency. There is nothing God-given about how things should be. The laws themselves dissolve into quantum mush as you put them under the microscope.

However that is half the story. The other half is about the order that must arise if a chaotic mess of fluctuations is also in interaction. If there are correlations between events, then patterns will emerge as organising regularities. And mathematical models - of probabilistic ensembles - show the inevitability of the emergence of this kind of global or macroscopic order.

There might be no law, no limitations at the microscale, but laws or limits are what emerge in predictable fashion at the macroscale. A classical determinism is what finds its full expression as a fact of a process of development.

Breaking a symmetry is just the first step. Once a system has started down that road, it is going to keep going to the end (what is to stop it?). And so the macroscale limit is a system in a state that is fully broken - asymmetric in a fully homogenous fashion. Or one that has arrived at its final resting equilibrium state, as they say.

So modern physics has an emergentist ontology where reality is about "laws" that develop in a succession of increasingly more particularised global constraints. And what characterises a natural law, as opposed to some local "non-holonomic" constraint, is that it applies everywhere equally in the Universe.

But also - the new thing - is that this cascade of symmetry breakings unfolds in time ... as the Cosmos cools and expands. So the ontology is developmental and not existential. We can talk about particle mass before the electro-weak symmetry breaking for example. But that is also a somewhat meaningless concept because before that transition, there was no effective Higgs field to quantify that mass - make "massive" particles actually subject to the gravitational effects of being heavy or light.

Thus laws about massive particles - ones that have to fly along at less than light speed, with all the further symmetry-breaking implications of that - are both universal ... now ... and also merely emergent ... back at some particular time. Early on in the Big Bang, those further constraints were both a mathematical inevitabilty but also only latent as a potential. As "the law", they did not yet exist.

So this Peircean approach - a Cosmos that evolves a regularity of habits due to the inevitability that to exist involves the necessity of a univocal or global intelligibility - is at the heart of a modern scientific approach to Creation.

And Wheeler - back in the 1980s - was pretty clear about the pan-semiotic direction things needed to go. The ground of existence is a relational network of interactions. Quantum information. The questions reality can ask of itself to give itself classical definiteness ... and then the limits to that which are the source of all the quantum "weirdness".

This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question, How come existence? No escape is evident from four conclusions:

(1) The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any preestablished continuum physical law.

(2) There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum.

(3) The familiar probability function or functional, and wave equation or functional wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information-theoretic source from which they derive.

(4) No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy.

Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.

The fundamental laws are fundamental because they take us back to the beginning. — apokrisis

Not quite the beginning, as I understand it - just a moment after.

And the fact that the Universe did then develop in such a way to give rise to stars>matter>life, is the subject of the well-known anthropic cosmological argument. The fact that some physicists promote the idea of a 'multiverse' to avoid that very implication speaks volumes in my opinion.

It is about completing a metaphysical project initiated by the Ancient Greek metaphysicians even before the theocrats came along and started nicking their ideas in an attempt to legitimate their various brands of Church. — apokrisis

'Completing the metaphysical project' assumes that a biological intelligence, which has evolved as a consequence of adaptive necessity, is able to arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, which may be entirely unconnected with it. I don't see any scientific reason for that assumption. (As explored in an old essay by Tom Wolfe.)

With luck, we will find there could have only been only the one Cosmos at a fundamental level — apokrisis

Indeed. And 'Cosmos' means 'an ordered whole'.

The ground of existence — apokrisis

I would put it as 'the ground of existents'.

Not quite the beginning, as I understand it - just a moment after. — Wayfarer

It depends what you want to believe about time before it got going. It sounds like you want to start the counting of the Planckian moments from zero rather than one. :)

And the fact that the Universe did then develop in such a way to give rise to stars>matter>life, is the subject of the well-known anthropic cosmological argument. The fact that some physicists promote the idea of a 'multiverse' to avoid that very implication speaks volumes in my opinion. — Wayfarer

You mean that if your metaphysics is of the unconstrained kind that will spawn cosmic infinities, then the anthropic principle is the only constraint you have got left to wield.

The multiverse is not used to evade anthropery. Anthropery is used to make the multiverse feel respectable.

'Completing the metaphysical project' assumes that a biological intelligence, which has evolved as a consequence of adaptive necessity, is able to arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, which may be entirely unconnected with it. I don't see any scientific reason for that assumption. — Wayfarer

Hmm. It's more a conclusion. On the face of it, the thought we can completely understand existence seems implausible. In practice - if you hang out with the science long enough - it instead becomes remarkable how much we can understand in a deep mathematically inevitable way.

And the fact that the Universe did then develop in such a way to give rise to stars>matter>life, is the subject of the well-known anthropic cosmological argument. The fact that some physicists promote the idea of a 'multiverse' to avoid that very implication speaks volumes in my opinion. — Wayfarer

I don't know of any reputable physicists who claim that the universe purposely developed to give rise to life. Why isn't life everywhere, or any other place than Earth for that matter? Who knows what kind of varying and interesting molecular interactions there are throughout the universe over its history?

'Completing the metaphysical project' assumes that a biological intelligence, which has evolved as a consequence of adaptive necessity, is able to arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, which may be entirely unconnected with it. I don't see any scientific reason for that assumption. (As explored in an old essay by Tom Wolfe.) — Wayfarer

Was this a truth statement? If we can't get arrive at some general conception of truth or reason, then how is that you arrived at this idea that we can't? Your statement defeats itself.

It seems to me that survival would be the perfect catalyst for determining the truth (truth being the degree by which your model of the world is accurate). Any organism that is able to perceive its environment in more detail can use its energy more efficiently in finding food and mates.

The fundamental laws are fundamental because they take us back to the beginning. If the Cosmos evolved, there has to have been an initial state of high symmetry that then became the current succession of increasingly broken symmetries. — apokrisis

If you would read physicist Lee Smolin's "Time Reborn", you might come to understand that these so-called fundamental laws are actually extremely limited in their applicability. The laws are produced from the human perspective, which is a small range of possible perspectives midway between the extremely small and the extremely large. Furthermore, the laws are verified by highly controlled experimental conditions, which confine the perspective into an even smaller range of possible perspectives.

When we extrapolate, any tiny error is multiplied, sometimes exponentially. Therefore any extrapolation towards the "beginning", or "end", of the universe is extremely unreliable, and I would say ought to be simply dismissed as unprincipled speculation.

All the time I've been reading the posts in this discussion, especially back at the beginning with the quotes from Cartwright, it struck me that all the criticism doesn't really apply to just laws of nature, it applies to all human language. Everyday we deal with the fact that what language expresses is not really true without any big problem. People can get tangled up in words and start to believe that have an independent existence, but most of us don't get lost like that.

For me, the same is true for laws of nature, from the time I first learned about them in junior high, I think I understood their conditional nature. As an engineer that is even clearer. Engineering solutions tend to be patched together, ad hoc, situation specific, but the laws of thermodynamics and motion can't be avoided. The sum of forces in all directions equal zero or the building falls down.

I’m not sure how you are understanding Smolin. I agree with him about the reality of time. The fundamental laws as they are framed are purely bottom up and deterministic. So that makes our macroscopic reality a kind of epiphenomenal illusion if you simply take those fundamental laws as the complete story.

Whereas I am arguing that the laws represent global constraints. And that now includes the macroscopic correlations that emerge to suppress local degrees of freedom. This is true emergence - where there is also now top-down holism to shape the fine grain of things.

The current laws don’t directly encode that. But you do then have the separate kinds of laws - the various mechanics vs the various thermodynamics - that give you enough of both sides of the story.

So for example, quantum mechanics gets fixed by gluing it to statistical mechanics to give you decoherence theory. More generally, deterministic local physics gets fixed by global information holography. The goal is for a unified physics that puts both aspects of a systems approach together in the same theory - ie: quantum gravity.

So yes, an unconstrained set of micro variables will have nonlinearity. And a purely bottom up mechanics is going to suffer a lack of scaling because of that. We are very used to physicists complaining their theories produce infinities that somehow in reality must get cancelled away. Step back from the microscopic and things explode.

But already physics tames that in various ways by adding in the emergent correlations that would act to suppress the nonlinearIties. The problem is that these constraints are still mostly kluges handcrafted to deal with a particular situation.

On the other hand, we are happy to accept global optimality arguments in science. Biology is comfortable with natural selection as the global invisible hand suppressing nonlinear variety. And condensed matter physics is now mathematically pretty mature.

So I don’t think that my view is radically out of line with Smolin’s. I agree that the fundamental laws alone - the ones that describe the universal microscopic degrees of freedom - can only be half the story. You also need those universally emergent macroscopic constraints that then suppress and shape those freedoms wherever they might occur.

So this is the four causes Aristotelian story. And as has been a point of difference with you in the past, I am saying that finality has to emerge via development. Global constraints are what become fully realised at the end of time. At the beginning of time, they exist only in a potential or latent sense.

Whereas I am arguing that the laws represent global constraints. — apokrisis

What Smolin argues is that while some represent the laws of physics as "global", they really are not. Check out the chapter he calls "Doing Physics in a Box".

The method of restricting attention to a small part of the universe has enabled the success of physics from the time of Galileo.

...

To study a system we need to define what is contained and what is excluded from it. We treat the system as if it were isolated from the rest of the universe, and this isolation itself is a drastic approximation. We cannot remove a system from the universe, so in any experiment we can only decrease, but never eliminate, the outside influences on our system. — Smolin

Also, check out the chapter he calls "The Cosmological fallacy":

It remains a great temptation to take a law or principle we can successfully apply to all the world's subsystems and apply it to the universe as a whole. To do so is to commit a fallacy I will call the cosmological fallacy. — Smolin

So I don’t think that my view is radically out of line with Smolin’s. — apokrisis

Well, we haven't even gotten to the limitations of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and what he calls "the fallacy of applying thermodynamics to the universe as a whole".

`

Any organism that is able to perceive its environment in more detail can use its energy more efficiently in finding ofood — Harry Hindu

Right - any organism. And that is a biological observation. It is not a justification of reason. Biology has nothing specific to say about that.

Everyday we deal with the fact that what language expresses is not really true without any big problem. People can get tangled up in words and start to believe that have an independent existence, but most of us don't get lost like that. — T Clark

Yes and no. As in, you're right about the language thing, but the stakes are higher than just 'being careful with language'. Holding to a certain view of the laws will always entail holding a certain kind of cosmology or even philosophy. Those who think natural selection governs biology in detail will say stupid things like 'rape is biologically sanctioned' or some other equivalant sociobiological excrescence. Those who cannot understand the scope of 2nd law ought to argue, against all self-evidence, that no physical organization is possible. At stake too are deeper questions about contingency and necessity, nature and culture, and their specific interplay. So language is important, yes, but it is important as a specific index of a host of other, wider, cosmological issues.

Cartwright's next book, The Dappled World, actually programmatically lays out the implications of the approach: "This book supposes that, as appearances suggest, we live in a dappled world, a world rich in different things, with different natures, behaving in different ways. The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid. They do not take after the simple, elegant and abstract structure of a system of axioms and theorems. Rather they look like - and steadfastly stick to looking like - science as we know it: apportioned into disciplines, apparently arbitrarily grown up; governing different sets of properties at different levels of abstraction; pockets of great precision; large parcels of qualitative maxims resisting precise formulation; erratic overlaps; here and there, once in a while, corners that line up, but mostly ragged edges; and always the cover of law just loosely attached to the jumbled world of material things. For all we know, most of what occurs in nature occurs by hap, subject to no law at all. What happens is more like an outcome of negotiation between domains than the logical consequence of a system of order." (The Dappled World, p. 1)

A world as far removed from Platonic logos as one can imagine.

The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid. — StreetlightX

Ah. It's all mere bricolage. The political agenda shows itself.

If getting the world right implies a political agenda, then sure, guilty as charged, accepted with glee.

Ah. It's all mere bricolage. The political agenda shows itself. — apokrisis

What is the political agenda associated with StreetlightX's view?

Pomo neo-Marxist socialist politically correct er... some other empty epithets, I imagine.

Pomo neo-Marxist socialist politically correct er... some other empty epithets, I imagine. — StreetlightX

That doesn't explain much, but that's ok. We can leave it at that.

As SX says, Pomo neo-Marxist socialist political correctness.

Both left and right like to make their own readings of naturalism. And nature itself gets obscured in the process.

Banno put it once nicely in a post long ago - something like: the point of scientific equations is to add up nicely. — StreetlightX

I remember that discussion! Glad you found it useful.

If I recall correctly the point was that potential energy is no more than a convenient way to balance the books. There are plenty of other examples of such creative accounting.

That doesn't explain much — T Clark

No, it doesn't - it's a completely empty set of words used by simpletons and dimwtis, so much so that one can predict exactly when and where it gets wheeled out. Especially by those with a proven track record of limited vocabulary.

Glad you found it useful. — Banno

Yeah, I was profoundly bothered by it at the time, but it nagged at me and it's helped me to think certain things through more clearly.

What is the political agenda associated with StreetlightX's view? — T Clark

I wonder the same things. Admittedly, before one even decides weither there are Laws of Nature or there are not, the content of those laws cannot be presupposed. Maybe they are the most Pomo Neo-Marxist Laws there's even been, or maybe they are a fascist's domination society wetdream...

On the other hand, I can only encourage anyone who, like SLX, denounces the abuse of the terms of Law and legal usage in philosophy and science. As my initial interest in philosophy was Philosophy of Law, I am expectedly very sensitive to the quick recourse to legal terminology in philosophy.

The worse aspect of which being, of course, that whenever a philosopher requisition the use of legal terminology in a philosophical argument, he very rarely does so without committing a serious category mistake. The latest anti-abortion thread gave a very evident exemple of this : the pro-lifer's claim that "abortion is murder". By which, they mean, abortion is wrong, and should be treated legally as murder, but since murder is a legal term before it is a moral one (in fact, there are probably no other domain of discourse that have generated quite as many general usage terms than the Law : tolerance, prescription, hell, even pontificate!), all the pro-lifer does in shouting "abortion is murder" is setting himself up for the quickest technical shutdown there can be.

Now those moralists could very well claim that Law and Morality are correlated, something which would be outside the aim of this thread to contemplate. My own position is that the recourse to correlate the domains of morality and legality is almost always unjustified. If that is the case, quite obviously, then I'm even more ready to denounce the move to irremediably link the legal domain and the scientific domain.

And this link is quite tenuous. It relies on a truncated and outdated notion of Law as the Sovereign's edicts (in this case, a barely concealed theologist throwback), for which Austin has already been duly criticised for. As Hart demonstrated, the Law is not in anyway similar to the immutable orders of an all powerful Sovereign, no more than it is similar to the relation established between a gun-toting bank robber and those he orders to give up their belongings.

The abuse of law by "science" and philosophy of nature is rather infertile, too. The analogy only seem to work so far as we limits ourselves to the axiomatic character of the Law. What's the route of appeal for science? What are the rules of recognitions? The contractual laws of science? What about the initial conditions of the Universe qualifies as Laws? Because they are set in stone, so to speak? But then the past would always have the value of Law!

The external recourse to legality is almost always (if I were less prudent, I would say always) an abuse motivated by the need to inject morality or the possibility of a moral stand in regards to the object of the discourse. This is even more tragic since the Law is almost always unable to perform this injection by itself.