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?

Speakers & Talks:

• Mark Addis (The Open University & London School of Economics) — "Context dependent lawlike generalisations in complex model based reasoning systems using category theory"
• Solal Azoulay (University of Strasbourg) — "The epistemology of CP laws in experimental economics"
• John Donaldson (University of Glasgow) — "Laws of nature and causal completeness"
• Sepehr Ehsani (London School of Economics) — "Modelling scientific laws: From putative generalisations to nomological characterisation"
• Peter Fedichev (Gero AI) — "A minimal model explains aging regimes and guides intervention strategies"
• Laura R. Franklin-Hall (New York University) — "Are there explanatory laws of pregnancy?"
• Jinyeong Gim (Chonnam National University) — "Mechanistic explanation as law-based explanation: Reconsidering the role of laws in the organization of mechanisms"
• Jens Harbecke (Witten/Herdecke University) — "Mechanistic constitution as a natural law in Better Best Systems"
• Patric Harting (Lingnan University) — "Law-based explanations of chemical structure"
• Lina Jansson (University of Nottingham) — "Do symmetries explain conservation laws? Or vice versa? Or do neither explain the other?"
• Ye-Eun Jeong (Columbia University) — "What makes laws usable? Exceptionless laws, ceteris paribus practice"
• Jennifer S. Jhun (Duke University) — "Nomological machines and near-decomposability"
• Stephan Leuenberger (University of Glasgow) — "Law and inference to the best explanandum"
• José Antonio Pérez Escobar (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) — "Mathematical explanations, laws, and law-like principles: An underexplored connection in biology"
• João Pinheiro da Silva & Ben Clark (University of St Andrews / Michigan State University) — "Why conservation laws need not worry dispositionalists"
• Bryan Roberts (London School of Economics) — "Is symmetry more fundamental than the laws of physics?"
• Deniz Sarikaya (Vrije Universiteit Brussel / University of Lübeck) — "Laws and theories in precision medicine"
• Laura Senis Villacé (University of Valencia) — "From evidence to laws? Pragmatic constraints on nomological explanation in psychiatry"
• Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi (King's College London) — "The narrative path to precision"
• Philip H. Thonemann (London School of Economics) — "How are laws in physics teaching and philosophy related?"
• Jidong Wang (Fudan University / London School of Economics) — "Laws in linguistics: Law-like generalizations and evolutionary models"
• Andrew Wayne (University of Guelph) — "A new pragmatics for law-based explanation"

Poster & Flash-Talk Presentations:

• Daian Vlad Bica (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf) — "The mismatch problem is the chief challenge of the Best System Analysis"
• Oliver Jin (University College London) — "Description versus explanation: Unification in Mach and Kitcher"
• Lina Mandal (Jadavpur University) — "Do scientific laws explain reality? On laws, models, and the limits of explanation"
• Brian Moon (Perigean Technologies LLC) — "Beyond laws and mechanisms: Admissibility and the reconstruction of scientific explanation"
• Nanxin Wei (University of Birmingham) — "Top-down laws and bottom-up mechanisms, companion in modelling"
• Yishu Zhuo (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) — "Necessitated to act: The lawlikeness of human action"

Panel Contributions:

• Barbara Bravi (Imperial College London) — "Statistical and machine learning modelling in biology: Considerations and examples from immunology"
• Amir Feizi (Gero AI) — "Machine learning and generalisations in research on age-related diseases"
• Lorenzo Zucca (King's College London) — "Potential parallels with legal philosophy and creative imagination"

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