Realism of Laws of Nature: what does it consists of?

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Published: 30-11-2017

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Edgar Eduardo Rojas Durán
Facultad de Filosofía Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
Mexico
Biography
Vol 37 No 1 (2018), Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15304/ag.37.1.3995
Submitted: 17-03-2017 Accepted: 22-09-2017 Published: 30-11-2017
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Abstract

This paper aims to answer the question: what does the realism of laws of nature consist of? To achieve this, in the first part, three philosophical accounts of laws of nature are presented and examined: the universalist, the dispositionalist and the counter-factualist. The presentation and examination focuses on the answer given by each of these accounts to the question: what is a law of nature? Later, in the second part, convergences and divergences between these three accounts are shown. Finally, in the third section, the points of agreement between them are put together to advance the fundamental thesis that encompasses each of these accounts as realist accounts of laws of nature. This thesis, I argue, is at the end the core of the general realist stance on laws of nature that I name “Realism of Laws of Nature”

Keywords:

universals, dispositions, counterfactuals, necessity, regularities, antirealism, scientific explanation
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