What Is Philosophy of Science? by Rickles Dean;

Author:Rickles, Dean; [Rickles, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509534180
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2020-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

The first is not a true statement of a law: there might be some worlds with laws of physics and chemistry exactly like ours, in which there are gold spheres with masses greater than 100,000 kg – perhaps some civilization travels through the universe collecting gold to make such a sphere. However, the second statement is true: plutonium would be unstable for masses much less than 100,000 kg (assuming the density is not too low). Note, however, that both are true of our universe: there are spheres of neither type for these masses. But the latter is true in a way the former is not. Universality of form – i.e. being able to put the generalization into the form All a’s are b’s – is not sufficient for being a law. What we need to get this distinction is the notion of a “counterfactual conditional”: “if a had been the case, then b would have been the case.” If we run the two statements above through this, then we see that only the plutonium case is true:

If there were a solid gold sphere, then it would weigh less than 100,000 kg.

If there were a solid pure plutonium sphere, then it would weigh less than 100,000 kg.

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