Despite the idiosyncratic behavior of individuals, empirical regularities exist in social and economic systems. These regularities often arise from simple underlying mechanisms which, analogous to the natural sciences, can be expressed as universal principles or laws. In this essay, I discuss the similarities between economic and natural phenomena and argue that it is advantageous for economist...

It is widely held that, in his pre-Critical works, Kant endorsed a necessitation account of laws nature, where are grounded essences or causal powers. Against this, I argue that the early priority explaining and unifying natural world, as well their irreducible role grounding necessity. Laws key constituent Kant’s explanatory naturalism, rather than undermining it. By laying out neglected disti...

This paper describes a natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored a • in the knowledge base by querying it in English. The system analyzes W the query and decides through a matching process ...

In this paper I explain why I favour a metaphysics in which all fundamental natural properties are essentially dispositional. First, by considering what a world might be like that has no laws, I argue that properties can necessitate laws, and that this is best explained by dispositional essentialism concerning those properties. I then argue that we should not regard any properties as being exce...

A new version of transition logic is presented. It integrates (dynamic) transitions, which change world states, and classical (static) reasoning, restricted in the paper to Horn logic with negation and constraints. This is achieved by de ning a deductive relationship `(T; ) among formulas for a partially order set (T; ) of transitions. This novel integration provides a uni ed framework for prac...

A wide variety of natural processes are described using physical laws. A physical law may be expressed by means of an algebraic equation or a differential equation governing the physical process. Classical methods of Geostatistics have been designed to use mainly statistical knowledge about natural variables and they lack the ability to incorporate physical laws in the mapping analysis. On the ...