Laws Across Scientific Perspectives
Laws Across Scientific Perspectives

Summary/Abstract: Is the concept of law of nature consistent with historically situated scientific practices? Can we account for the historical development of the very concept across history of science? Recently, Michela Massimi (2018a) has offered a positive argument to address those questions. According to Massimi, laws have a historical and metaphysical nature, and laws perform the role of axioms in series of systems of propositions across multiple scientific perspectives. Laws have to be reassessed, goes on the view, in the light of a perspectivist stance towards scientific practice (Massimi 2018a, 2018b). However, I argue that perspectivism has to acknowledge a distinction between particular laws, general concepts of lawhood and perspectival laws. This latter addition meets the no-law or law nihilism challenge: whether there is a unitary concept of law across multiple practices, given that the concept is subject to radical theoretical changes (Giere 2006). My own contribution is to explore to what extent perspectival laws stay the same across theoretical changes, and how perspectival laws are unceasingly explored in real actual scientific perspectives.

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