In the twelfth century, Gratian equated natural law with divine law. Albertus Magnus would address the subject a century later, and his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica I-II qq. 90-106 restored natural law to its independent state and affirmed natural law as the participation of the rational creature in eternal law. [45] However, since human reason could not fully comprehend the eternal law, it had to be supplemented by the revealed divine law. (See also Bible Law in Christianity.) Meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas taught that all human or positive laws are to be judged by their conformity with natural law. An unjust law is not a law in the true sense of the word. It merely retains the “appearance” of the law, insofar as it is properly constituted and enforced, as it is a just law, but is itself a “perversion of the law.” [46] At this point, natural law was used not only to judge the moral value of various laws, but also to determine what those laws meant in the first place. This principle sowed the seeds of possible social tensions on tyrants. [47] The problem here undermines the importance of the role of explanations in understanding. The required validity brings a semantic circularity, because the content of the explanans would then be sufficient for the truth of the explanandum.
According to regular representations of the DN model, at least one law of nature must be a premise in an “explanatory argument”. In fact, at least one law must be essential to the validity of the argument, and the laws that are part of the explanations are clearly a factor of circularity. To add to these challenges, it is worth remembering what Dretske pointed out regarding laws and declarations. However, for this reward to really exist, more needs to be said about what N is. This is a problem that van Fraassen calls the identification problem, which he associates with a second problem, which he calls the inference problem (1989, 96). The essence of this pair of problems was captured early on by Lewis with his usual intuition: if one is a Humean, then the Humean mosaic itself does not seem to allow for further explanation. Since this is the ontological foundation in which all other existing things must be explained, none of these other things can really explain the structure of the mosaic itself. This complaint has been expressed for a long time, usually as an objection to any humane presentation of laws. If laws are nothing more than generic features of the Humenic mosaic, then there is a sense in which these same laws cannot be invoked to explain the particular characteristics of the mosaic itself: laws are what they are by virtue of the mosaic and not the other way around (Maudlin 2007, 172).
There is, indeed, a law, a just reason, which accords with nature; existing in everything, immutable, eternal. To order us to do the right thing, to forbid us to do the wrong thing. He has dominion over good people, but no influence over bad people. No other law can be replaced, no part of it can be repealed or repealed completely. Neither the people nor the Senate can acquit him. It is not one thing in Rome and another thing in Athens: one thing today and another thing tomorrow; But it is eternal and unchanging for all nations and for all times. [27] This has given rise to many discussions, including some challenges. For example, suppose there are ten throws of a fair play and the first nine earthheads (Dretske 1977, 256-257). The first nine cases confirm – at least in a sense – the generalization that all flips will land heads; The probability of this generalization is increased from (.5)10 to 0.5. But this generalization is not lawful; If that is true, it is not a law.
It is common to respond to such an example by arguing that it is not the relevant notion of confirmation (that they are only “snippets of content”) and by suggesting that what requires legality is confirmation of unexamined cases of generalization. Note that in the case of the part, the probability that the tenth landing head launches does not change after the first nine warheads are launched. However, there are also examples that create problems for this idea. To know what is right, one must use one`s reason and apply it to the commandments of Thomas Aquinas. It is believed that this reason is embodied in its most abstract form in the concept of a primary commandment: “Good must be sought, evil must be avoided.” [54] St. Thomas explains that: Some advocate anti-reductionist and anti-supervenience views (Carroll 1994, 2008, Ismael 2015, Lange 2000, 2009, Maudlin 2007, Woodward 1992). On the question of what it means to be a law, they reject Humes` answers; They often deny the Humenian supervenomy, and they see no advantage in appealing to universals. They reject any attempt to say what it means to be a law that does not invoke nomic concepts. Yet they still believe that there really are laws of nature; They are not anti-realists. Maudlin sees law as a primitive status and laws as ontological primitives—fundamental entities of our ontology. His project is to show what labor law can do by defining physical possibilities in the form of laws and describing law-based relationships on the counterfactual conditional and explanation. Carroll`s analysis of legislation is done in terms of causal/explanatory concepts.
The starting point is the intuition that laws are not accidental, that they are not coincidences. However, not being a coincidence is not all there is to having a law. For example, it might be true that there are no golden balls over 1000 miles in diameter because there is so little gold in the universe. In this case, strictly speaking, this generalization would be true, reasonably general and not accidental. However, it would not be a law. Arguably, what prevents this generalization from being a law is that something in nature—really, an initial state of the universe, the limited amount of gold—is responsible for the generalization. Compare this to the law that inertial bodies have no acceleration. With this and other laws, it seems that this applies because of nature (itself).
Lange`s treatment (2000, 2009) involves an account of what it means to be a law in the sense of a counterfactual concept of stability. The overall representation is complicated, but the basic idea is this: to call stable a logically closed set of true sentences if, and only if, the members of the set would remain true given a precursor compatible with the set itself. For example, the set of logical truths is trivially stable because logical truths would be true no matter what. A set that contains the random generalization that all people are sitting in the room, but agrees with the thesis that someone in the room shouts “Fire!” would not be a stable sentence; If someone shouted “fire,” someone would not be sitting in the room. Lange argues that no stable set of subnomic facts—except, perhaps, the set of all truths—contains a random truth. “By identifying laws as members of at least one nonmaximal stable whole, we discover how the regularity of a subnomic fact is determined by subnomic facts and subjunctive facts about them” (2009, 43). Here are four reasons why philosophers examine what it means to be a law of nature: First, as noted above, laws seem to play at least a central role in scientific practice. Second, laws are important for many other philosophical issues. For example, philosophers, triggered by the presentation of the counterfactual narratives of Chisholm (1946, 1955) and Goodman (1947), as well as the deductive-nological explanatory model of Hempel and Oppenheim (1948), wondered what makes counterfactual and explanatory claims true, thought that laws matter, and thus also wondered what distinguishes laws from non-laws. Third, Goodman suggested that there is a link between legality and confirmation through inductive reasoning.
Thus, some who sympathize with Goodman`s idea come to the problem of laws because of their interest in the problem of induction. Fourth, philosophers love good puzzles. Let us suppose that everyone is sitting here (cf. Langford 1941, 67). Then, trivially, that everyone is sitting here is true. While true, this generalization does not appear to be law. It`s just too random. Einstein`s principle that no signal moves faster than light is also a true generalization, but on the other hand, it is thought to be a law; It`s not as random.