Sharif Digital Repository

In Laws and Lawmakers: Science Metaphysics and the laws of nature, Mark Lang has presented an engagingly written, tightly argued, and novel philosophical account of the laws of nature. One of the intuitions behind the notion of a law of nature is, roughly, that of the many regularities we observe in the world there are some which appear to be due to mere happen-stance(“accidental” regularities, in the philosopher’s jargon)while others, which we call “laws,” seem to be possessed of a degree of necessity. although many philosophers, and certainly most scientists, will readily agree that there is a difference between logical, law-like, and accidental regularities, spelling out the nature of... 

In Naming and Necessity and Identity and Necessity, Kripke convinced many that there are necessary propositions which are knowable only a posteriori. Kripke’s examples of these propositions can be placed into three categories: 1) Some mathematical propositions like Goldbach’s conjecture (the conjecture that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes) 2) Scientific truths like “Water is H2O”, “Gold has the atomic number 79”, etc. 3) Identity statements flanked on both sides with proper names; like “Hesperus is Phosphorus”, “Cicero is Tully” and the like (in the rest of this article, these three categories will be called, respectively, the first, the second and...