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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PHILOSOPHY

Billy Wheeler

Idealization
and the Laws of
Nature
SpringerBriefs in Philosophy
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Billy Wheeler

Idealization and the Laws

of Nature

123
Billy Wheeler
Department of Philosophy
Sun Yat-Sen University
Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

ISSN 2211-4548 ISSN 2211-4556 (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-319-99563-2 ISBN 978-3-319-99564-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99564-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951702

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Peter
Lipton and Joan Ruth Perriman
Foreword

In this book, Dr. Wheeler presents an original account of laws that brings the
relatively minor issue of idealization to the centre of the debate and shows how
strongly it is related to the far more prominent issue of simplicity. This reimagining
of the debate suggests the application of algorithmic information theory as a formal
mathematical theory which deals with simplicity. Using algorithmic information
theory is not entirely novel—although it is rarely done—but Dr. Wheeler goes back
to the historical ideas and shows us how the theory, designed to capture simplicity,
can also be used to address idealization.
This book advances the growing interest in using informational and computa-
tional methods in philosophy of science. More personally, the outcome of the new
account which strikes me as most interesting is the possibility of intertwining the
epistemology and metaphysics of laws in a substantive way. The difficulty of
achieving this is arguably a major reason many philosophers of science have lost
interest in laws, and Dr. Wheeler offers us a possible way back.
Finally, Dr. Wheeler gives us a book which examines and builds complex ideas
with enviable clarity. In all, this is quite an achievement for a first book.

London, UK Phyllis Illari

March 2017

vii
Preface

Philosophers have known for some time that our most successful scientific laws do
not describe perfectly the observed behaviour of the world. As an example, consider
the law of the pendulum:
sffiffiffi
l
T ¼ 2p
g

As any high school science student can tell you, this law only accurately
describes the behaviour of an ‘ideal pendulum’, one which is subject to no friction,
has an infinitely long cord, and whose mass is concentrated at a single point. For
practicing scientists, the fact real-world pendulums and other oscillating bodies do
not meet these ideal standards seems to be of little concern. Engineers can work
around them by making suitable approximations, and precise values, when they are
needed, can be calculated by both minimizing the effect of friction and other
influences, or by working out their effect mathematically and adjusting the law
suitably.
That no real-world physical system can be constructed to meet the ideal stan-
dards of many laws is rarely a problem for scientists. Things are much harder to
explain for philosophers of science, however, who themselves have been working
under an idealization about the nature of laws and how they relate to the world. It is
often assumed that whatever else a law of nature is, it provides a statement that is
universally true. This then raises a conundrum for philosophers: how should we
treat the exceptions that appear in nature? Do they show that our best current laws
are not, in fact, genuine laws of nature? Do they show that laws can be true without
correctly describing physical behaviour? Or do they show that laws can be both
false and lawlike at the same time?
Most of the philosophical debate about exceptions has taken place around the
idea of a ‘ceteris paribus law’. Such laws are false and exception-ridden when given
in their simple form, but true and exceptionless when hedged with a so-called
‘ceteris paribus proviso’. Typically, if the law says ‘Fs are Gs’, then the hedged

ix
x Preface

ceteris paribus laws says ‘All else being equal, Fs are Gs’. As is well known in the
field, ceteris paribus laws give rise to serious problems of their own: the most
famous being how to interpret ‘all else being equal’ in a way that does not make the
law a tautology. Whilst I do not doubt that ceteris paribus laws can be found in
numerous scientific fields, I believe the attention they have received by philoso-
phers has been disproportionate. This is because laws which are about ‘ideal sys-
tems’, such as the law of the pendulum, are not easily cast in terms of ceteris
paribus provisos. In fact, there are a number of key differences that justify sepa-
rating ideal laws from ceteris paribus laws.
Take, for example, Nancy Cartwright’s classic example of a ceteris paribus law
‘aspirins relieve headaches’. This law has many instances (taking aspirin often
really does relieve a headache) even if we cannot specify clearly why it fails when it
does. Compare this with an ideal law, like the law of the pendulum. This law has no
instances in nature (because we cannot reduce friction to zero or have an infinitely
long cord) and conversely to the aspirin law, we can state clearly the conditions
needed for the law to obtain. Ideal laws seem to belong to a different class of
exception-ridden laws to ceteris paribus laws, and it is not initially obvious that one
can be reduced to the other.
This book provides the first full-length discussion of ideal laws and how they
ought to be understood metaphysically. It turns out that many of the most famous
theories of lawhood, such as Armstrong’s ‘nomic necessitation view’ and Lewis’
‘best system account’, fail to explain why there are ideal laws in scientific theories.
By tracing through the problems with existing theories of lawhood, a new expla-
nation of ideal laws is proposed. It will be argued that only by thinking of laws of
nature as algorithms whose purpose is to compress empirical data, can we fully
understand what an ideal law is and why they are so prevalent in scientific theories.
This theory is inspired by David Braddon-Mitchell’s paper ‘Lossy Laws’. There he
argued that the best system account can be improved if axioms are allowed to have
exceptions by analogy to lossy compression in computer science. I agree with
Braddon-Mitchell, but the theory I put forward is much broader in that it abandons
Lewis’ commitment to laws as statements in favour of a theory which identifies
them as algorithms. In this respect, it has a lot more in common with the
‘inference-ticket view’, originally held by logical empiricists such as Moritz Schlick
and Gilbert Ryle.
In Chap. 1, I closely examine the origin of the debate surrounding exceptions to
laws and critically evaluate some supposed solutions to the problem, such as that of
‘hedging’, ‘concretization’ and ‘nomic elimination’. It turns out that there is no easy
solution to the problem of ideal laws, and that the only way to fully understand
what they are and why they should exist in scientific theory is to examine their
metaphysics.
Chapter 2 presents accounts of the metaphysics of ideal laws from the ‘gov-
erning conception’, which understands laws to be necessary and determining of the
regularities observed in nature. Three governing conceptions of laws will be dis-
cussed: those of David Armstrong, Cartwright and Brian Ellis. I will show that
Preface xi

whilst some of these theories have success in accommodating ceteris paribus laws,
they fail disastrously when extended to cover ideal laws as well.
The opposite of the governing conception is the ‘non-governing conception’ of
laws, sometimes called ‘Humean’, and Chap. 3 will focus on solutions to ideal laws
from this tradition. Again, three accounts of ideal laws will be proposed based on
three different non-governing conceptions of lawhood: Lewis’ original best system
account, the so-called ‘better best system account’ recently put forward by Markus
Schrenk and Matthias Unterhuber, and the ‘inference-ticket view’ of Schlick and
Ryle. It turns out that non-governing conceptions have much better success than
existing governing conceptions in accounting for why ideal laws should be so
important to science. However, none of the three discussed can currently provide a
full picture.
Chapter 4 presents an algorithmic theory of laws which takes the best of the best
system account and the inference-ticket view. It is argued that Ernst Mach’s
explanation of theories as efficient representations of nature provides the best
explanation for why there are ideal laws in science, and the algorithmic theory
provides the right metaphysical foundation for this view. When the algorithmic
theory is combined with Braddon-Mitchell’s distinction between lossless and lossy
compression, then ideal laws are identified with the lossy algorithmic compressors
of scientific theories. On this picture science, and in particular scientific theories, are
seen as a solution to a problem: how best to encode all empirical data. By analogy
with data compression in computer science, lossy compression is sometimes
desirable when there is redundancy in data quality. I introduce the concept of
predictive redundancy by analogy to perceptual redundancy in image compressors
such as JPEG and explain ideal laws as the inevitable result of predictive redun-
dancy in scientific theories.
What emerges is a new explanation of idealization and ideal laws in science that
provides indirect support for the algorithmic theory as an answer to what it means to
be a ‘law of nature’.

Zhuhai, China Billy Wheeler

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