Laws and Symmetry
Abstract
Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality, and that conception played a role in the birth of modern physics some centuries ago, but today physicists speak in terms of symmetry, transformations, and invariance. Laws and Symmetry's three main objectives are: first, to show the failure of current philosophical accounts of laws of nature; second, to refute arguments for the reality of laws of nature; third, to contrib ute to an epistemology and a philosophy of science antithetical to such metaphysical notions. The latter involves an inquiry into the character and role of symmetry and of symmetry arguments in the physical sciences.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
There are various well-known objections to Primitivism, for example that its primitives are illicit and that it falls prey to van Fraassen's inference problem.
“There are various well-known objections to Primitivism-for example, that its primitives are illicit, that it falls prey to van Fraassen's (1989) inference problem, etc.”
From The nomological argument for the existence of God (2022) · cites this paper as van Fraassen (1989)
Cites
Tooley, M. (1977) · Canadian Journal of Philosophy · doi:10.1080/00455091.1977.10716190 · Cited by 681 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The Divine Lawmaker: Lectures on Induction, Laws of Nature, and the Existence of God
Foster, J. (2004) · Oxford University Press · doi:10.1093/0199250596.001.0001 · Cited by 78 · see citing works
Governing Without A Fundamental Direction of Time: Minimal Primitivism about Laws of Nature
Chen, E. K., & Goldstein, S. (2022) · Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-96775-8_2 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
Read, J., & Møller-Nielsen, T. (2020) · Synthese · doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1817-5 · Cited by 49
Does the counterfactual theory of explanation apply to non-causal explanations in metaphysics?
Reutlinger, A. (2017) · European Journal for Philosophy of Science · doi:10.1007/s13194-016-0155-z · Cited by 45 · see citing works
The nomological argument for the existence of God
Hildebrand, T., & Metcalf, T. (2022) · Noûs · doi:10.1111/nous.12364 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
Why P rather than Q? The curiosities of fact and foil
Barnes, E. (1994) · Philosophical Studies · doi:10.1007/bf00989743 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
- Authors
- Fraassen, B. C. V.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Fraassen, Bas C. van
- Publisher
- Oxford University PressOxford
- Published
- 1989-11-02
- OpenAlex
- W4242534497
- Cited by
- 1,821
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 76 · 2025: 150 · 2024: 51 · 2023: 57 · 2022: 57 · 2021: 86 · 2020: 74 · 2019: 136 · 2018: 76 · 2017: 47 · 2016: 43 · 2015: 46 · 2014: 42 · 2013: 31 · 2012: 50
- FWCI
- 77.00
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- DIAL (Catholic University of Leuven) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy and History of Science
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy, Science, and History
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Keywords
- laws of nature, symmetry, invariance, necessity, universality, metaphysics of law, philosophy of physics, symmetry arguments, epistemology of science
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
