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The Bounds of Law: Universality in Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

David Gruender
David Gruender*
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Extract

The idea that events in nature are, somehow, governed by natural laws, and that to understand those laws would be a key to understanding the events—is a very old one. Whether abstracted from a religious context, or arrived at through independent reflection about nature, this idea first became prominent in the early days of what we now call science. Since the time geometry was worked out in axiomatic form, some 2,300 years ago, the combination of its deductive power, together with the understanding it yielded of the fundamental physical realm of space, I think it is fair to say geometry has stood as the very model of what we ought to expect laws of nature to look like, as well as how they ought to function.

This phenomenon can be seen in the work of Euclid himself, especially that in mechanics (Clagett 1955).

Type
Part IV. Laws and Theories
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1984 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1984 , 1984 , pp. 94 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1984

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