Laws of nature and natural laws

The relationship between conceptions of law and conceptions of nature is a complex one, and proceeds on what appear to be two distinct fronts. On the one hand, we frequently talk of nature as being lawlike or as obeying laws. On the other hand there are schools of philosophy that seek to justify ethics generally, or legal theory specifically, in conceptions of nature. Questions about the historical origins and development of claims that nature is lawlike are generally treated as entirely distinct from the development of ethical natural law theories. By looking at the many intersections of law and nature in antiquity, this paper shows that such a sharp distinction is overly simplistic, and often relies crucially on the imposition of an artificial and anachronistic suppression of the role of gods or divinity in the worlds of ancient natural philosophy. Furthermore, by tightening up the terms of the debate, we see that the common claim that a conception of ‘laws of nature’ only emerges in the Scientific Revolution is built on a superficial reading of the ancient evidence.     

Laws and meta-laws of nature: Conservation laws and symmetries

Symmetry principles are commonly said to explain conservation laws—and were so employed even by Lagrange and Hamilton, long before Noether's theorem. But within a Hamiltonian framework, the conservation laws likewise entail the symmetries. Why, then, are symmetries explanatorily prior to conservation laws? I explain how the relation between ordinary (i.e., first-order) laws and the facts they govern (a relation involving counterfactuals) may be reproduced one level higher: as a relation between symmetries and the ordinary laws they govern. In that event, symmetries are meta-laws; they are not mere byproducts of the dynamical and force laws. Symmetries then explain conservation laws whereas conservation laws lack the modal status to explain symmetries. I elaborate the variety of natural necessity that meta-laws would possess. Proposed metaphysical accounts of natural law should aim to accommodate the distinction between meta-laws and mere byproducts of the laws just as they must accommodate the distinction between laws and accidents.     

产品上市周期中物流、信息流作用规律分析

缩短产品上市周期对提高企业的竞争力具有重要的意义,本文通过对物流、信息流的相互作用过程和规律分析,提出物流过程是影响产品上市周期的瓶颈所在,问题解决的关键在于加强信息流对物流的控制和调节,加强企业物流管理信息系统的建设。     

Unnatural acts: The transition from Natural Principles to Laws of Nature in Early Modern science

This paper's aim is to explain the transition that occurred during the Early Modern period, from Principles of Nature to Laws of Nature. Natural Principles are taken to be innate to substances and arise from their natures, while Laws of Nature are external and imposed from without. The paper takes the view that to explain this transition, one needs to examine the history of philosophical theories of substantial action. It argues that during the late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern era, philosophers began to disentangle substantial actions from the nature of substances. This process of disentangling action eventually led to the concept of Laws of Nature, according to which laws compel a body to act in a certain way even though its nature does not.     

Pepsinogens, progastricsins, and prochymosins: structure, function, evolution, and development

Five types of zymogens of pepsins, gastric digestive proteinases, are known: pepsinogens A, B, and F, progastricsin, and prochymosin. The amino acid and/or nucleotide sequences of more than 50 pepsinogens other than pepsinogen B have been determined to date. Phylogenetic analyses based on these sequences indicate that progastricsin diverged first followed by prochymosin, and that pepsinogens A and F are most closely related. Tertiary structures, clarified by X-ray crystallography, are commonly bilobal with a large active-site cleft between the lobes. Two aspartates in the center of the cleft, Asp32 and Asp215, function as catalytic residues, and thus pepsinogens are classified as aspartic proteinases. Conversion of pepsinogens to pepsins proceeds autocatalytically at acidic pH by two different pathways, a one-step pathway to release the intact activation segment directly, and a stepwise pathway through a pseudopepsin(s). The active-site cleft is large enough to accommodate at least seven residues of a substrate, thus forming S₄ through S₃′ subsites. Hydrophobic and aromatic amino acids are preferred at the P₁ and P₁′ positions. Interactions at additional subsites are important in some cases, for example with cleavage of κ-casein by chymosin. Two potent naturally occurring inhibitors are known: pepstatin, a pentapeptide from Streptomyces, and a unique proteinous inhibitor from Ascaris. Pepsinogen genes comprise nine exons and may be multiple, especially for pepsinogen A. The latter and progastricsin predominate in adult animals, while pepsinogen F and prochymosin are the main forms in the fetus/infant. The switching of gene expression from fetal/infant to adult-type pepsinogens during postnatal development is noteworthy, being regulated by several factors, including steroid hormones. Received 25 May 2001; received after revision 27 August 2001; accepted 30 August 2001     

Bird, Kuhn, and positivism

I challenge Alexander Bird’s contention that the divergence between Kuhn’s views and recent philosophy of science is a matter of Kuhn having taken a wrong turn. Bird is right to remind us of Kuhn’s naturalistic tendencies, but these are not clearly an asset, rather than a liability. Kuhn was right to steer clear of extreme referential conceptions of meaning, since these court an unacceptable semantic scepticism. Although he eschewed the concepts of truth and knowledge as philosophers of science have tended to understand them, this doesn’t mean that, as Bird claims, Kuhn was a sceptic about scientific knowledge. Bird’s claim that recent philosophical naturalism represents a rejection of positivism far more thorough than Kuhn’s is problematic since, from a different perspective, this kind of naturalism can be seen to have inherited some equally important positivistic themes. Finally, it’s not clear that Kuhn should have endorsed a computational approach to the philosophy of science, such as connectionism, since such approaches may be more behaviouristic, and thus unacceptably positivistic, than the original cognitive revolution promised.     

Physicalism,realization, and structure

In the philosophy of mind and psychology, a central question since the 1960s has been that of how to give a philosophically adequate formulation of mind-body physicalism. A large quantity of work on the topic has been done in the interim. There have been, and continue to be, extensive discussions of the ideas of physicalism, identity, functionalism, realization, and constitution. My aim in this paper is a modest one: it is to get clearer about these ideas and some of their interrelations. After providing some background and history, I shall focus on two related topics: the distinction between a functional property and a structural one and the dispute over whether a realization account of the mental-physical relation provides a better physicalist account than a constitutional account.     

QFT, antimatter, and symmetry

A systematic analysis is made of the relations between the symmetries of a classical field and the symmetries of the one-particle quantum system that results from quantizing that field in regimes where interactions are weak. The results are applied to gain a greater insight into the phenomenon of antimatter.     

Microbes,mathematics, and models

Microbial model systems have a long history of fruitful use in fields that include evolution and ecology. In order to develop further insight into modelling practice, we examine how the competitive exclusion and coexistence of competing species have been modelled mathematically and materially over the course of a long research history. In particular, we investigate how microbial models of these dynamics interact with mathematical or computational models of the same phenomena. Our cases illuminate the ways in which microbial systems and equations work as models, and what happens when they generate inconsistent findings about shared targets. We reveal an iterative strategy of comparative modelling in different media, and suggest reasons why microbial models have a special degree of epistemic tractability in multimodel inquiry.     

Ecotype,ecospecies, and macroevolution

Summary Der Autor tritt erneut der Ansicht der Neodarwinisten entgegen, daß geographische, erbliche Varianten Vorstufen neuer Arten seien. Für deren Entstehung sowie für Merkmale höherer Einheiten kommen nur plötzlich große und nicht einzelne summierende Mutationsschritte in Betracht. Mikromutationen liefern lediglich das Material für die Entstehung von Rassen und Unterarten. Nicht nur größere systematische Unterschiede, sondern auch Anpassungsmerkmale kommen durch Großmutationen zustande. Als Beispiele werden unter anderem zwei Mutationen beiDrosphila melanogaster angeführt. Bei der einen sind die Flügel in Halteren, oder umgekehrt, diese in Flügel, umgebildet. Bei der anderen, vom Autor aufgefundenen, sind aus den Flügeln beinartige Organe geworden. Diese Mutante ist außerdem deswegen von Bedeutung, weil sich nach Kreuzung mit anderen Mutationen Merkmale entwickeln, die an den letzteren nicht erscheinen.Paper read at the closing session of the International Congress of Zoology, Paris, July, 1948.     

Causation,information, and physics

This work outlines the novel application of the empirical analysis of causation, presented by Kutach, to the study of information theory and its role in physics. The central thesis of this paper is that causation and information are identical functional tools for distinguishing controllable correlations, and that this leads to a consistent view, not only of information theory, but also of statistical physics and quantum information. This approach comes without the metaphysical baggage of declaring information a fundamental ingredient in physical reality and exorcises many of the otherwise puzzling problems that arise from this view-point, particularly obviating the problem of ‘excess baggage’ in quantum mechanics. This solution is achieved via a separation between information carrying causal correlations of a single qubit and the bulk of its state space.     

Acceptance,values, and probability

This essay makes a case for regarding personal probabilities used in Bayesian analyses of confirmation as objects of acceptance and rejection. That in turn entails that personal probabilities are subject to the argument from inductive risk, which aims to show non-epistemic values can legitimately influence scientific decisions about which hypotheses to accept. In a Bayesian context, the argument from inductive risk suggests that value judgments can influence decisions about which probability models to accept for likelihoods and priors. As a consequence, if the argument from inductive risk is sound, then non-epistemic values can affect not only the level of evidence deemed necessary to accept a hypothesis but also degrees of confirmation themselves.     

Understanding,explanation, and unification

In this article I argue that there are two different types of understanding: the understanding we get from explanations, and the understanding we get from unification. This claim is defended by first showing that explanation and unification are not as closely related as has sometimes been thought. A critical appraisal of recent proposals for understanding without explanation leads us to discuss the example of a purely classificatory biology: it turns out that such a science can give us understanding of the world through unification of the phenomena, even though it does not give us any explanations. The two types of understanding identified in this paper, while strictly separate, do have in common that both consist in seeing how the individual phenomena of the universe hang together. Explanations give us connections between the phenomena through the asymmetric, ‘vertical’ relation of determination; unifications give us connections through the symmetric, ‘horizontal’ relation of kinship. We then arrive at a general definition of understanding as knowledge of connections between the phenomena, and indicate that there might be more than two types of understanding.     

Phylogeography of crossbills, bullfinches, grosbeaks, and rosefinches

Mitochondrial cytochrome b (cyt b) from 24 Carduelini species including crossbills, bullfinches, grosbeaks, rosefinches, and other related, but not conclusively classified species, was sequenced. These sequences were also compared with all the available sequences from the genera Carduelis, Serinus, and Passer. Phylogenetic analyses consistently gave the same groups of finches and the calculated divergence times suggest that speciation of the studied species occurred between 14 and 3 million years ago (Miocene-Pliocene), appearing before the Passer, Carduelis, and Serinus genera. Pleistocene glaciations may have been important in sub-speciation. Crossbills are integrated within the genus Carduelis, and within redpolls; the common crossbill shows subspeciation with Loxia japonica in the Pleistocene epoch. Pinicola enucleator groups together with bullfinches and is probably the ancestor of the group. Hawfinch is only distantly related to the studied groups, and might either represent an isolated genus or be related to the New World genus Hesperiphona. The grosbeak genera Eophona and Mycerobas are clearly sister groups, and species belonging to the former might have given rise to Mycerobas species. The isolated (in classification) Uragus sibiricus and Haematospiza sipahi are included within the genus Carpodacus (rosefinches); Carpodacus nipalensis is outside the genus Carpodacus in the molecular analyses and might be an isolated species or related to the genus Montifringilla.