Normische gesetzeshypothesen und die wissenschaftsphilosophische bedeutung Des nichtmonotonen schliessens
David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
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Journal for General Philosophy of Science 32 (1):65-107 (2001)
Normic Laws and the Significance of Nonmonotonic Reasoning for Philosophy of Science. Normic laws have the form ‘if A then normally B’. They have been discovered in the explanation debate, but were considered as empirically vacuous (§1). I argue that the prototypical (or ideal) normality of normic laws implies statistical normality (§2), whence normic laws have empirical content. In §3–4 I explain why reasoning from normic laws is nonmonotonic, and why the understanding of the individual case is so important here. After sketching some foundations of nonmonotonic reasoning as developed by AI-researchers (§5), Iargue that normic laws are also the best way to understand ceteris paribus laws (§6). §7 deals with the difference between physical and non-physical disciplines and §9 with the difference between normicity and approximation. In §8 it is shown how nonmonotonic reasoning provides a new understanding of the protection of theories against falsification by auxiliary hypotheses. §10, finally, gives a system- and evolution-theoretical explanation of the deeper reason for the omnipresence of normic laws in practice and science, and forthe connection between ideal and statistical normality.
|Keywords||normic laws nonmonotonic reasoning ceteris paribus normality (prototypical vs. statistical) system theory evolution theory theory protection approximation|
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Hannes Leitgeb (2011). Logic in General Philosophy of Science: Old Things and New Things. Synthese 179 (2):339 - 350.
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