The Pros And Cons Of The Traditional View

1 In response to this problem, defenders of the Traditional View argue that if we were able to take into account every confounding factor and sum them all, we would indeed get a perfectly accurate prediction, even if this is almost never a practical possibility.
2 If both premises are true, then they guarantee that the conclusion (3) must also be true, and what better explanation for a phenomenon could we expect than a demonstration of why the phenomenon is guaranteed to happen given the initial conditions? The explanation becomes a prediction if we know the initial conditions but have not yet observed the results.
3 In our example above, careful measurement can support the truth of the first premise because it is a description of a single
object and event.
4 , Cartwright, 1983; Mitchell, 1997).
5 Deductive logic usually takes the form of an argument in which a series of premises supports a conclusion in a special sort of way.
6 Therefore, in order to ensure that both premises are true, Premise 2 must be a law of nature.
7 The second premise, however, is a generalization rather than a direct observation of a single event, and normally there is no guarantee that such a generalization will continue to hold in the future.
8 Critics of laws of nature (and of the Traditional View in general) use the persistent mismatch between prediction and reality described in the previous section as evidence that there are no exceptionless regularities in nature.
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10 If this means that such fields do not include any actual laws of nature, then their scientific status gets seriously threatened because, according to the Traditional View, scientific knowledge is always based on laws of nature.
11 Unfortunately, the problem shows up again and becomes more pronounced when we move away from physics.
12 A law of nature on the other hand, is a necessary truth about our universe rather than a mere regularity or transient pattern.
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14 Arguments with this form are called “deductively valid.
15 Practical of complications In practice, it turns out that there is a persistent mismatch between what is predicted by a law of nature and what is actually observed (see, e.
16 ” Our example above can be converted into a deductively high valid argument thusly: This object has a mass of 1 kg and is subjected to a force of 5 N.
17 As a simple example, suppose we observe a one kilogram object accelerate at 5 m/s after being subjected to a 5 Nforce.
18 A highly common proposed solution is to say that laws in those fields are such that they hold as long as a set of standard conditions apply, with the standards being supplied by a theory from the relevant field.
19 Johnny Pena Laws of nature, of which include Newton’s laws of motion and law of conservation of energy, are exceptionless regularities and are assumed to be fundamental features of nature.
20 In fields like geology, biology and psychology, the dynamic systems under study are highly variable and ever changing, and so any regularities we observe are almost never universal or exceptionless.
21 Once we know the fundamental features of nature, we can use them to explain (or hsa prediction) all sorts of crazy phenomena , which is what make science so successful.
22 For an overview, see Hooker (1998).
23 For those unfamiliar, the standard unit for acceleration (change in velocity per second) is meters per second per second, represented as (m/s)/s, or just m/s2 The unit of force is called a “Newton,” which is short for There are many distinct threads running through the history of our understanding how science works.
24 Such laws are often called ceteris paribus laws 4 (Schiffer, 1991).
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26 Lange, 1999; Rupert, 2006).
27 Notes There are various alternative ways to characterize laws of nature.
28 Therefore, this object's acceleration is 5 m/s2 Premise 1 describes the starting conditions, Premise 2 is Newton’s 2nd law of motion, and the conclusion is a description of the phenomenon.
29 By the end of the Enlightenment, repeated success in using laws of nature to explain and predict a wide variety of phenomena had popularized the notion that the universe is like a giant clockwork mechanism in which scientists, given a precise account of current conditions, could predict the exact state of the universe at any point in the future.
30 If we want to know why the object accelerated in that way, we can explain it using Newton’s second law of motion.
31 What I am calling the “Traditional View” is just the most dominant thread.
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33 Further, the critics argue that contemporary accounts of science deny that science aims to supply incontrovertible truths, thus undermining the need for laws of nature in the first place (e.
34 Mitchell, 1997; Woodward and Hitchcock, 2003; Machamer, Darden and Craver, 2000).
35 A famous example: Even the past observation of ten thousand swans, all of which are completely white, is no guarantee that the next next swan observed will not be black.
36 According to the Traditional Views of science going at least as far back as Aristotle, science is able to supply some incontrovertible truths about nature.
37 That is, if the premises of a deductive argument are true, the s conclusion is guaranteed to be
true.
38 In our example above, given the initial conditions, it is very unlikely that the acceleration of the object will turn out to be exactly 5 m/s2 because confounding factors (like air resistance or other forces) are always acting on the object, even under highly controlled conditions.
39 Of course, in order for a deductive argument to successfully guarantee the truth of its conclusion, the premises themselves must actually be true.
40 The only style of reasoning that philosophers believe to be capable of supplying some truths about anything is deductive logic, and so it was assumed that some scientific reasoning must follow deductive logic in order to deliver its truths about nature (e.
41 Contemporary Debate Perhaps the most important contemporary debate in this area concerns whether nature really contains any laws at all.
42 Carnap, 1966; Hempel, 1962).
43 For any object, if the object is subjected to a force of X and the object’s mass is Y, then the object’s acceleration is X divided by Y.
44 Proponents of laws of nature, including some who no longer follow the Traditional View, argue that even if scientific explanations and predictions do not rely on laws of nature, nature itself may still contain such laws, and nature’s laws may yet be uncovered and clarified by continued scientific investigation (e.