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This chapter traces the decline of the maxim of Christianity’s incorporation into the law. It discusses the transformation in attitudes during the antebellum era through the impact of movements toward codification and making the law “scientific.” These developments influenced jurists’ attitudes about the law’s immutability and its relation to Christian principles. The chapter traces the gradual rejection of the maxim by judges in legal areas such as profane swearing, oaths, probate law, church property disputes, and Sunday law enforcement.

This chapter addresses how laws and natural necessity figure in scientific understanding, by developing and extending Marc Lange’s and John Haugeland’s complementary accounts of the role of laws in scientific practice. Lange and Haugeland identify what laws are from their roles in research and scientific understanding, but from different directions. Lange began with laws’ constitutive, holistic counterfactual or subjunctive invariance, in contrast to accidents. This invariance accounts for the laws’ contribution to inductive strategies, counterfactual reasoning, explanation, and disciplinary orientations even in the “special” sciences, and provides a principled, univocal understanding of the manifold varieties, levels, and domains of necessity expressed by sets of laws. Haugeland took laws as constitutive rules for domains of scientific inquiry. The laws, together with scientific skills and commitments, have a normative role in scientific understanding that requires their characteristic necessity. Haugeland thereby makes intelligible the mutual accountability of data and methods with empirically defeasible theoretical frameworks. The chapter concludes that the mutually constitutive roles of conceptual patterns in the world and scientific capacities for pattern recognition show why scientific understanding is a form of material and discursive niche construction rather than linguistic representation, in order to account for the two-dimensional normativity of conceptual understanding.

This chapter takes up the role of experimental practice in the articulation of conceptual understanding in the sciences, as a passage between the Scylla of merely “Given” experiential or causal impacts, and the Charybdis of merely intra-linguistic coherence. Experiment does not just provide occasions for conceptual development, whose requisite work would be linguistic or mathematical. Conceptual articulation in scientific practice involves interplay between theoretical models and experimentally configured patterns: the chapter therefore extends conceptions of theoretical models as mediators between theory and world to recognize a double mediation by models and experimental phenomena. The latter’s material complexity, incorporating apparatus, shielding, and skilled performance, is integral to conceptual significance. Hacking and Cartwright limit the scope of concepts to where they are empirically accurate, in their efforts to acknowledge experimental articulation of concepts, but that renders them empty by collapsing their two-dimensional normativity. The conceptual significance of salient experimental patterns can extend further, through the mutual normative accountability between “outer recognition” of a pattern’s presence, and “inner recognition” of its appropriate elements, Scientific understanding is thereby always open to further intensive and extensive conceptual articulation, guided by contestable, future-directed issues and stakes in experimental systems and scientific practice.

The notion of rule utilitarianism has been discussed under two main headings: ideal-rules utilitarianism and “indirect” utilitarianism. The chapter sketches out each perspective along three different dimensions: (1) the grounding of rules, (2) the allowed complexity of rules, and (3) the conflict of rules. Careful attention to Mill's main arguments in Utilitarianism indicates that he adheres to neither perspective consistently, though he is closer to the indirect utilitarian position. The chapter next surveys the logic of practice and the Art of Life, in Mill's System of Logic, and finds several main considerations there that figured importantly in Mill's discussion of utilitarian justification. The same conclusions hold up when we put Mill's rule utilitarianism in context, as provided by looking at two distinct thematics—moral rules and utilitarian justification—on offer in these two very different texts.

This chapter argues that some of the fundamental forces and scientific “laws” of the universe may reveal that natural resources are not just made up of use qualities, but also a parallel, and equal, nonuse dimension. Recognition of resource nonuse, as a symmetrical mirror to resource use, would be consistent with broadly held beliefs about the functioning of nature in other contexts.

Henry Brooks Adams always knew for whom he wrote. It was not for himself, or his friends, or his family, but for the ages. His letters to his brother, Charles Adams, undulate with confused and forbidden desires. Descended from glory, Adams needed to make his own place in family history. He knew the Civil War was the defining event for his generation. Adams introduced ideas and feelings that persisted for decades. Intellectually, he searched for the equations that would unlock history and society, contemplated the nature of democratic institutions and the power of scientific laws, and flirted with mysticism. Emotionally, he alternated between hope and despair, he craved something more yet sensed he must settle for something less. The letters grab one because they are immediate and honest, unvarnished. The stories told in the correspondence differ from the stories told in the Education.

This chapter presents three replies to the argument that being committed to scientific laws does not entail a commitment to determinism and hence is compatible with free will. First, there are appeals to other scientific principles. These concede that acknowledging the aptness of some law, or even some set of laws, does not entail determinism. Second, there are appeals to the future which acknowledge that the sciences as we currently understand them do not entail determinism or prohibit free will. Third, there are appeals to mystery. These admit that our present scientific understanding of the world does not commit us to determinism or prohibit free will, and that we might not be able to produce an “ideally completed science” which would do so, perhaps on Cognitive Pluralist grounds.

This chapter covers the literary and critical works of Karl Pearson and Walter Pater. Pater and Pearson are separated philosophically not by any combat about realism, nor by the thoroughness of their commitment to science and scientific method. The voices of science and of art speak from within consciousnesses they describe as closed off from the realities of the world around them. Pearson has to defend the claims of science to intellectual authority. The Grammar of Science is the culmination of the journey undertaken by Arthur. Pearson's theories of causation, scientific law, and empirical perception are threatened by the problem of the particularity of subjectivities. The resort to the language of science is neither accidental nor gratuitous. Positivism becomes a shadow child of romanticism.

This chapter's main focus is the examination of several kinds of attempts to craft scientifically rigorous psychological theories that make use of the intentional notions “belief” and “desire.” Commonsense belief–desire explanations of behavior may well be based on models that involve implicit or explicit generalizations, but these lack the special regimentation and rigor which are characteristic of scientific laws. Arguably, the notion of “natural laws” was invented only during the seventeenth century, and if “folk psychology” is supposed to be something that is shared by scientific and pre-scientific humans, it cannot make use of a notion of law which is of such recent vintage. The question of whether there are laws at the level of intentional states can be settled only by looking, not at the most widespread form of intentional explanation, but at the best forms we can come up with.

A primary good of science is that it allows us to accurately predict what will happen in the future. Knowing what to expect helps alleviate anxiety about the future and allows for good planning. However, although scientific predictions are often very precise and accurate, they are inherently uncertain. In order for a scientific prediction to be certain, several conditions would have to be satisfied. First, it would have to be certain that the universe is deterministic, but this is contested by both philosophers and scientists. Second, it would have to be certain that the actual scientific laws governing the deterministic universe have been identified—this is far from certain. Third, the precise initial conditions that the prediction is drawn from would have to be known with certainty—it is impossible to know these with certainty. Nevertheless, despite the fact that scientific predictions are uncertain, it would be foolish to disregard them.

One of the chief aims of science is understanding. The primary way that we achieve understanding of natural phenomena is by constructing explanations of how and why the phenomena occur as they do. The explanations provided by science are inherently uncertain. Due to the complexity of the phenomena being explained and our limitations as humans, scientists rely on models when constructing explanations. By their vary nature, models are uncertain because they essentially involve idealizations (abstractions or distortions of the facts) for the purpose of simplification. Although scientists legitimately infer that the best explanation of a given phenomenon is true, this method of inference is always uncertain for at least two reasons. The first is simply that the data being explained are limited (i.e., there is always more data that could have been gathered). The second is that there are always alternative explanations that might later be discovered.

This chapter discusses the relevant notions of freedom and determinism, and then explains why belief in laws of nature is sometimes thought to entail determinism and hence threaten freedom. It attempts to address the question of whether our actions are all causally determined by natural laws and prior events, or whether at least some of our actions involve free will. The chapter argues that our commitment to scientific laws does not entail a commitment to determinism, and hence that acknowledging that there are such laws does not give us reason to doubt the existence of free will. No arguments for free will, however, will be presented here, nor shall it be argued that determinism is false. The conclusion is that the prima facie reason for the belief in free will is not incompatible with the existence of natural laws, and that the sciences provide no reason to give up any existing commitment to the thesis that we are capable of acting freely.