New Directions in Law-Based Explanations in the Sciences

When we look at current research across the natural and social sciences dealing with explanations of phenomena in their respective fields, the word ‘explanation’ is often modified with an adjective: causal, non-causal, mechanistic, nomological/law-based, topological, mathematical, and narrative are some of the non-mutually-exclusive modifiers that one may encounter. It is generally accepted that fields such as physics rely more on laws for their explanatory practices than disciplines such as cell biology, which are, for the most part, concerned with mechanistic explanations, for example. In the philosophy of science, particularly since the advent of the New Mechanism literature in the 1990s, barring some exceptions, there has been relatively little sustained work on the pragmatic side of law-based explanations as opposed to other explanatory modalities, and the interest that law-based explanations have garnered has mostly focused on the metaphysics of laws. This workshop aims to bring the philosophy of law-based explanations, with particular attention to their pragmatic dimensions, back into focus. Moreover, while being historically informed, the hope is to discuss new directions within this strand of the philosophy of explanation. Some questions for consideration could include (in no particular order):

• In the sciences that have traditionally relied more on law-based explanations, are there any law-discovery programmes, or has the pool of available laws reached a plateau in most law-heavy disciplines? How can one begin such a programme in a law-light field?
• Has the strict law vs. ceteris-paribus law distinction, or the terminological variety of law-talk such as ‘nomological’, ‘nomothetic’, ‘lawlike’, ‘generalisation’, ‘principle’, and so on, been conducive to, or has it hindered, law-based explanations?
• How does a law-based explanation in physics or chemistry compare to a law-based explanation in, say, linguistics (notwithstanding superficial differences in subject matter)? Relatedly, do laws that could be said to straddle autonomous fields, e.g., thermodynamic laws in physics and chemistry, perform the same explanatory roles in both disciplines?
• How can laws and mechanisms gain traction in a combined nomological–mechanistic explanation? Moreover, how can an ‘understanding’ of a given phenomenon based on a law-based explanation differ from an ‘understanding’ based on a mechanistic explanation of the same phenomenon?
• How can metaphysical claims and arguments about laws of science translate into claims about the pragmatic role of laws in explanations?
• There have been successful modelling attempts using allometric scaling laws in biology. But are laws, especially newly posited laws, more refractory to modelling than, say, mechanisms? Relatedly, could laws be integrated into existing models of a given mechanism?
• What lessons could be drawn from the philosophy of law (i.e. legal philosophy) for law-based explanations in the sciences?

Confirmed Speakers:

• Sepehr Ehsani (LSE): can modelling the content of laws aid in their explanatory use?
• Amir Feizi (Gero AI): laws of ageing and longevity
• Alexander Gebharter (Marche Polytechnic University): preconditions for causal inference and non-causal laws
• José Antonio Pérez Escobar (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia): mathematical explanations in the sciences: principles, laws, or rules?
• Bryan Roberts (LSE): do laws of symmetry explain or ground the dynamical laws?
• Deniz Sarikaya (Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Universität zu Lübeck): laws and theories in precision medicine
• Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi (King's College London): laws in medicine and psychology
• Philip H Thonemann (LSE): pedagogical aspects of laws in physics explanations
• Jidong Wang (Fudan University & LSE): laws in linguistics