Muğla Universitesi, Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, Felsefe Bölümü, 48170 Kötekli / Mugğa, Turkey.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2010;32(4):433-51.
It is commonly agreed in the literature on laws of nature that there are at least two necessary conditions for lawhood--that a law must have empirical content and that it must be universal. The main reason offered for the requirement that laws be empirical is as follows: a priori statements are consistent with any imaginable set of observations, so they cannot be informative about the world and therefore they cannot provide explanations. However, we care about laws because we think that laws provide explanations and allow us to make predictions. Thus, if one of the functions of laws is to provide explanations and a priori propositions cannot fulfill this function, they cannot properly be viewed as laws. In this paper, I will aim to show that this argument for the claim that laws must be empirical does not work.
在自然法则的文献中，人们普遍认为法则的成立至少需要两个必要条件——法则必须具有经验内容并且必须具有普遍性。之所以要求法则具有经验性，主要原因如下：先验陈述与任何可以想象的观测结果一致，因此它们不能提供有关世界的信息，因此不能提供解释。然而，我们关心法则，是因为我们认为法则提供了解释，并且可以让我们进行预测。因此，如果法则的一个功能是提供解释，而先验命题不能履行这一功能，那么它们就不能被恰当地视为法则。在本文中，我将旨在表明，这种认为法则必须具有经验性的主张的论证是不成立的。
