Humanities Brown Bag Seminar

The question of the role that laws play in the process of scientific inquiry has long occupied an important place in philosophical discussions of laws of nature. Philosophers have typically approached this question by attempting to write down a job description for laws: a list of tasks that laws accomplish more or less on their own in scientific practice. Familiar candidates include furnishing us with predictions, providing explanations, underwriting counterfactual claims, and so on. This approach, I argue, runs into trouble: laws on their own are often not capable of performing many of the tasks that end up on these job descriptions. Rather, they must be supplemented by a wide variety of modelling ingredients before they can be of much use — what I call a law's supporting cast. Properly s peaking, it is in most cases a complex package of laws and supporting constructions that allows us to predict and explain the behavior of various systems, rather than simply the law itself. If w e want to develop a picture of the role that laws play in scientific practice, we should then look at the role that laws play in the construction of models. To this end, I suggest that laws play a coordinating role in scientific practice: they provide us with the kinds of coordinating frameworks that we need in order to construct models, which in turn provide us with predictions, explanations, and the like.