Bonn 2020 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 5: Laws of Nature

AGPhil 5.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, April 1, 2020, 14:00–14:45, H-HS III

Laws of nature and their modal surface structure — •Andreas Hüttemann — Universität zu Köln

I will start by arguing that the practices of explanation, confirmation, manipulation and prediction require a particular reading of the law statements involved, namely as making claims about systems. These claims, I will argue further, are modal statements, statements about how systems may or may not behave. More particularly I will defend three claims about the modality of laws. First, law statements attribute a space of possible states to systems. Second, laws constrain the temporal development of systems by virtue of what I will call law equations. Thirdly, the laws* inviolability or natural necessity can be explicated in terms of the fact that they are invariant with respect to a number of different kinds of circum-stances.