The physics of the past half-century has thoroughly discredited the simple atomistic view that an ultimate explanation of all natural processes may be found in a mechanism of cause-and-effect relations among such clearly defined entities as point-like particles. And yet, physics and the other sciences continue to find nature to be orderly and lawful. How do we reconcile this breakdown of what once seemed to be the causal basis for the order of nature with the continued discovery of new manifestations (...) of that order? The subject book [3] of this paper, written by the Professor of Theoretical Physics and Philosophy of Science at Buenos Aires University, may be considered to be a response to this question. There are many other things too in the book: it provides a much needed collecting, and sorting, of various questions that have been asked and answers that have been given with respect to causality. There are statements in the book that may be justifiably criticised, as I hope later to show; but in all I believe that Professor Bunge has given us a work that makes a contribution of importance to philosophical discussions of causality. (shrink)

Factual statements that might qualify for the status of law statements are classed from various philosophically relevant standpoints (referents, precision, structure of predicates, extension, systemicity, inferential power, inception, ostensiveness, testability, levels, and determination categories). More than seven dozen of not mutually exclusive kinds of lawlike statements emerge. Strictly universal and counterfactually powerful statements are seen to constitute just one kind of lawlike statements; classificatory and some statistical laws, e.g., are shown not to comply with the requirements of universality and counterfactual (...) force. Conditions for lawlike statements to be called laws are then examined, and a liberal criterion of lawfulness is finally proposed, which reads thus: A proposition is a law statement if and only if it is a posteriori (not logically true), general in some respect (does not refer to unique objects), has been satisfactorily corroborated for the time being in some domain, and belongs to a theory (whether adult or embryonic). It is claimed that criteria of laws change alongside with the emergence of new usages of the term 'law', and that by adopting a liberal criterion of lawfulness we would conform to contemporary usage and would cease inhibiting the search for regularities in the sciences of man. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to list the usual and some possible meanings--or at least those the writer found the most interesting--of the word 'level,' to specify them briefly, to illustrate them, and to propose some problems in which those concepts are involved. Should this semantical clarification prove useful in clearing the ground for ontological speculation, the thesis would be confirmed that there is no conflict between semantics and ontology as long as the former does not deny the (...) legitimacy of inquiries into the denotata of certain universal words, and as long as metaphysics is not reluctant to linguistic hygiene. (shrink)