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Must the Fundamental Laws of Physics be Complete?
Author(s) -
LANGE MARC
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2009.00246.x
Subject(s) - chapel , citation , law , computer science , library science , philosophy , theology , political science
Faraday made this remark even before the laws of electricity had all been discovered. Nevertheless, he was utterly confident that all electric phenomena are covered by laws and that all other forces are too indeed, apparently, that the laws cover every kind of situation that every possible kind of thing can manage to get into. The laws are "complete;" there are no gaps in their coverage. If the laws are in fact complete, then is this merely a peculiarity of the actual laws? Or is the laws's completeness metaphysically compulsory? That is the question I shall investigate. In section 2, I shall offer a provisional characterization of what it would be for the laws to be complete. In section 3, I will try to capture some reasons for supposing that the laws must be complete. I will also argue that neither David Lewis's best-system account nor David Armstrong's relations-among-universals account of laws entails that the laws must be complete. If the laws's completeness is an important part of the idea that the laws govern the universe, then an important (but heretofore neglected) criterion of adequacy for any metaphysical analysis of natural law is that it account for the laws's completeness. Since standard analyses of natural law fail to do so, there is an opportunity