McKenna, Travis
(2024)
Laws of Nature and their Supporting Casts.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
What role do laws of nature play in the process of scientific inquiry? In answering this question, philosophers have tended to focus on a handful of predictive and explanatory roles with which laws have been traditionally associated. I argue that this traditional focus overlooks an important fact about scientific practice: before they can be of any predictive or explanatory use, laws must often be supplemented by a wide variety of modelling ingredients, such as material parameters, boundary conditions, auxiliary models, and so on – what I call their supporting casts. As a result, many accounts of laws have trouble conferring lawhood on the kinds of generalisations and principles worth calling laws without also conferring it on those features that play a merely supporting role. I argue that the key to avoiding this problem lies in recognising the important role that laws play in helping us to coordinate the various different kinds of information we must make use of in our attempts to model some system and thus explain or predict its behaviour. In addition to contributing to a more complete philosophical picture of scientific methodology surrounding laws, my account of this coordinating role also helps us to identify several distinct explanatory and predictive roles that laws play in scientific practice.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
17 May 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
8 August 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
99 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Philosophy |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
laws of nature, explanation, scientific modelling |
| Date Deposited: |
27 Aug 2024 13:08 |
| Last Modified: |
27 Aug 2024 13:08 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/46880 |
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