Laws

Abstract

Most philosophers think of laws as universal in syntactic form.¹ But there is a stronger sense in which laws are thought of as universal. They are the kind of things that we think of as holding true everywhere if anywhere. Attempts have been made to make this idea precise in a number of different ways. Some speak of laws as making no reference to specific locations in space and time. Others take laws to contain no explicit space or time coordinates. Still others think of laws as invariant under space-time translations. Yet others speak of laws as unrestricted in range in space and time. It turns out that none of these attempts is very satisfactory in capturing the sought-after universality of laws.² Nonetheless, it is still commonly held that laws are (in some sense) “unrestricted” above and beyond the trivial sense in which any universal generalization is unrestricted.³