On 4/6/2017 5:51 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
JFS: In summary, I believe that the term 'law of nature' is
a metaphor for aspects of nature that we can only describe.
Again, I am asking about those aspects of nature /themselves/, not our
linguistic or mathematical descriptions of them. What class of Signs
are they?
Any law of science or even an informal rule of thumb that makes
reliable predictions reflects something real about the world.
That real aspect of the world is some kind of regularity. But
it isn't stated as a law until somebody states it as such.
For example, Immanuel Kant's habits were so regular that his
neighbors said that they could set their clocks by the time
he went out for his daily walk. That is an example of law-like
behavior. But it doesn't imply that there was a specific law
embodied in Kant's nature. That's just the way he behaved.
Obviously, in posing this question I am presupposing that general
laws of nature are real,
If a law we state makes reliable predictions, there must be
something real that makes it true. But that something may be
as elusive as whatever caused Kant's predictable behavior.
Calling it a law is a convenient metaphor for something that
we don't understand in detail.
For examples, think of the laws discovered by Galileo, Kepler,
Newton, and Einstein. Then think of the thousands or millions
of books, articles, and commentaries about those laws. Then
imagine what scientists might discover in the next millennium.
An interesting joke: "Gravity is a fraud. The earth sucks."
For predicting the way we walk in our daily lives, that joke is
as useful a metaphor as any of those scientific commentaries.
John
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