law of nature

law of nature, in the philosophy of science, a stated regularity in the relations or order of phenomena in the world that holds, under a stipulated set of conditions, either universally or in a stated proportion of instances. (The notion is distinct from that of a natural law—i.e., a law of right or justice supposedly derived from nature.)

Laws of nature are of two basic forms: (1) a law is universal if it states that some conditions, so far as are known, invariably are found together with certain other conditions; and (2) a law is probabilistic if it affirms that, on the average, a stated fraction of cases displaying a given condition will display a certain other condition as well. In either case, a law may be valid even though it obtains only under special circumstances or as a convenient approximation. Moreover, a law of nature has no logical necessity; rather, it rests directly or indirectly upon the evidence of experience.

Laws of universal form must be distinguished from generalizations, such as “All chairs in this office are gray,” which appear to be accidental. Generalizations, for example, cannot support counterfactual conditional statements such as “If this chair had been in my office, it would be gray” nor subjunctive conditionals such as “If this chair were put in my office, it would be gray.” On the other hand, the statement “All planetary objects move in nearly elliptical paths about their stars” does provide this support. All scientific laws appear to give similar results. The class of universal statements that can be candidates for the status of laws, however, is determined at any time in history by the theories of science then current.

Several positive attributes are commonly required of a law of nature. Statements about things or events limited to one location or one date cannot be lawlike. Also, most scientists hold that the predicate must apply to evidence not used in deriving the law: though the law is founded upon experience, it must predict or help one to understand matters not included among those experiences. Finally, it is normally expected that a law will be explainable by more embracing laws or by some theory. Thus, a regularity for which there are general theoretical grounds will be more readily called a law of nature than an empirical regularity that cannot be subsumed under more general laws or theories.

Universal laws are of several types. Many assert a dependence between varying quantities measuring certain properties, as in the law that the pressure of a gas under steady temperature is inversely proportional to its volume (see Boyle’s law). Others state that events occur in an invariant order, as in “Vertebrates always occur in the fossil record after the rise of invertebrates.” Last, there are laws affirming that if an object is of a stated sort it will have certain observable properties. Part of the reason for the ambiguity of the term law of nature lies in the temptation to apply it only to statements of one of these sorts of laws, as in the claim that science deals solely with cause and effect relationships, when in fact all three kinds are equally valid.