What happens next? How can philosophy overcome current debates about natural laws? Three topics are particularly interesting and important. The first concerns the question of whether legality is part of the content of scientific theories. This is a question that is often asked after causality, but less frequently after legislation. Roberts offers an analogy to support the idea that this is not the case: it is a postulate of Euclidean geometry that two points determine a line. But it is not part of the content of Euclidean geometry that this theorem is a postulate. Euclidean geometry is not a theory of postulates; It is a theory about points, lines and planes. (2008, 92). This could be a plausible first step in understanding the absence of certain nomic terms in formal statements of scientific theories. The second question is whether there are contingent laws of nature. The Needers continue to work to complete their point of view, while Humeans and others pay relatively little attention to what they do; The new work must explain the source of the underlying obligations that divide these camps. Finally, more attention needs to be paid to the language used to account for what laws are and the language used to express the laws themselves and whether laws explain. It is clear that recent controversies over generalizations in physics and the specialized sciences revolve precisely around these questions, but their exploration can also bear fruit in key questions related to ontology, realism versus antirealism, and supervenience. Essentially, there must be a specification of what the legislative relationship is (the identification problem).
Next, it must be determined whether it is suitable for the task (the inference problem): does keeping N between F and G mean that Fs are G? Does his position support counterfactuals? Do laws really turn out not to be superior, independent of the mind, explanatory? Armstrong says more about his legislative relationship. He responds to van Fraassen: Could an antirealist deflect this challenge by denying the links between legality and other concepts? Would that allow us to be unrealistic in terms of laws while remaining realistic, say, counterfactuals? The danger here is that the resulting position appears to be ad hoc. Concepts such as counterfactual, provisions, and causation have many of the same confusing features as case law; There are parallel philosophical questions and puzzles about these concepts. It is difficult to see what would justify antirealism in terms of legality, but not the other nomic concepts. Science encompasses many principles that have at least once been considered laws of nature: Newton`s law of gravity, its three laws of motion, the ideal laws of gas, Mendel`s laws, the laws of supply and demand, etc. Other laws important to science should not have this status. These include laws that, unlike laws, were (or still are) considered stronger by scientists. These include the regularity of ocean tides, the perihelion of Mercury`s orbit, the photoelectric effect of the expansion of the universe, etc. Scientists also use laws, but not other laws, to understand what is possible: Because of their agreement with Einstein`s laws of gravity, cosmologists recognize the possibility that our universe is closed and open (Maudlin 2007, 7-8). In statistical mechanics, the laws of an underlying physical theory are used to determine dynamically possible trajectories through the state-space of the system (Roberts 2008, 12-16). There is no need to revise the statement that no generalization considered random can be confirmed. In the case of the third son, one would know that the generalization, even if it were true, would not be a law.
The discussion continues. Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter proposed an alternative link between confirmation and the laws on which certain counterfactual truths must rest: The observation of As who are F-and-B confirms that all non-F-A are B only if the Aces would still have been both A and B if they had not been F.