The Software of the Universe: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Laws of Nature

by Dorato,Mauro

• ISBN13: 9780754639947
• ISBN10: 0754639940
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-08-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Software of the Universe introduces the history and philosophy of the concept of Laws of Nature addressing both philosophers and scientists with an interest in the methodological and philosophical issues raised by their disciplines. The book reconstructs the main stages of the historical development of the idea of laws of nature and claims that an explanation of the mysterious effectiveness of mathematics in the description of the empirical world is also a key to understand the nature of laws and their function in our knowledge.This book is a clear and well-written guide to the philosophy of laws of nature and offers a critical survey of the main positions debated in the current literature on the nature of laws of nature.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Acknowledgements	xvi
1 The Origin of the Idea of "Law of Nature"	1	(30)
Naturality and Normativity: The Role of Technology in the Transformation of our Metaphors about Nature	2	(4)
The Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of the World in Ancient Thought	6	(5)
The Controversial Medieval Origins of the Idea of Law of Nature: Jane Ruby's Thesis	11	(4)
The Notion of the Law of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: The Role of the "Other" Bacon	15	(3)
The Theological-Realistic Conception of Laws in the 1600's	18	(7)
The Conventionalistic and Analogical Interpretation of the Laws of Nature	25	(2)
The Completion of the Revolution: Newton and Beyond	27	(4)
2 Why are Laws of Nature Mathematical?	31	(35)
The "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" in Describing, Explaining and Predicting the Physical World	31	(4)
The Three Ingredients for 'Producing" the Laws of Physics	35	(1)
The Algorithmic View of Laws as a First Attempt to Explain Why the Laws of Physics are Mathematical	36	(8)
The Reducibility of the Laws of Coexistence to the Laws of Succession	44	(6)
Measurement as a Necessary Premise for the Mathematization of Laws	50	(9)
An Explicative Hypothesis on the Applicability of Mathematics	59	(7)
3 The Reducibility of the Laws of Nature	66	(24)
The Conceptual Geography of the Notion of "Law of Nature"	66	(2)
Laws, Predictions, and Regularities	68	(4)
Laws and Universality	72	(1)
The Spatio-Temporal Universality of Laws	72	(4)
Universality as Determinism	76	(1)
Universality as Absence of "Ceteris Paribus" Clauses	77	(2)
Laws and Truth: the Violation of a Fourth Meaning of Universality	79	(2)
Laws and Necessity	81	(1)
Laws and Causality	82	(1)
Laws and Counterfactual Conditionals	83	(2)
Laws and Scientific Explanations	85	(1)
Laws and Symmetry	86	(2)
Is the Concept of Law Irreducible?	88	(2)
4 What is a Law of Nature?	90	(28)
Mill-Ramsey-Lewis' Neoregularism	90	(3)
Further Difficulties of MRL's Neoregularism	93	(4)
Armstrong, Dretske and Tooley's Necessitarism	97	(7)
Necessitarism Founded on the Essential Properties of Bodies	104	(2)
Essences, Natural Kinds, and Species-Specific Biological Laws	106	(3)
More on the Problem of the Supervenience of Laws	109	(1)
Laws of Nature, Dispositions, and Natural Kinds	110	(2)
Could Dispositionalism be a Solution to the Problem of the Nature of Laws?	112	(6)
5 Laws and the Special Sciences	118	(20)
Natural Selection, Models and Invariant Scale-Phenomena in Living Beings	119	(6)
Psychological Laws, Psychophysical Laws, and Human Freedom	125	(5)
Mental Causation and the Mind as a Set of Dispositions	130	(3)
Laws in Economics and the Social Sciences	133	(4)
Conclusion	137	(1)
Bibliography	138	(10)
Index	148