“REAL KINDS” AND “GENERAL LAWS”

Necessary Laws and Chemical Kinds

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Lange and Laws, Kinds, and Counterfactuals

In this paper I examine and question Marc Lange’s account of laws, and his claim that the law delineating the range of natural kinds of fundamental particle has a lesser grade of necessity that the laws connecting the fundamental properties of those kinds with their derived properties.

Ceteris Paribus Laws: Genericity and Natural Kinds

Ceteris Paribus (cp-)laws may be said to hold only “other things equal,” signaling that their truth is compatible with a range of exceptions. Several theorists have suggested that because of this feature, these generalizations are semantically defective. Against these concerns, I argue that cp-laws are often stated using a special kind of construction found in natural language, generics, which,...

Structural Invariants, Structural Kinds, Structural Laws

The paper has three parts. In the first part ExtOSR, an extended version of Ontic Structural Realism, will be introduced. ExtOSR considers structural properties as ontological primitives, where structural properties are understood as comprising both relational and structurally derived intrinsic properties or structure invariants. It is argued that ExtOSR is best suited to accommodate gauge symm...

Ceteris Paribus Laws: Generics & Natural Kinds