Marc Lange, . Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 280. $99.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

A Tale of Two Vectors

“…The account of natural laws that I have elaborated elsewhere (Lange 2005(Lange , 2006(Lange , 2007(Lange , 2009 can nicely capture what it would take for the laws of statics to transcend the dynamical laws by possessing a stronger variety of necessity than they do -and thus what it would be for the parallelogram law to have a statical rather than a dynamical explanation. The key to this account will be the subjunctive facts (expressed by counterlegals) used by advocates of the statical explanation to express the parallelogram law's independence from dynamics, such as the fact that forces would still have composed in the same way even if force had stood in a different relation to motion.…”

“…The same applies to the confirmation of counterlegals. For instance, scientists typically regard the space-time symmetries of known force laws as confirming that the same symmetry principles hold of whatever unknown laws govern as yet undiscovered kinds of forces (see Lange 2007Lange , 2009). As in the emerald example, this confirmation fails to discriminate between actual unexamined and counterfactual cases; the evidence confirms that had the laws of nature been different so that subset of the other's), then for any fact that is in both, the smaller set "gives a better view of its true position"; such a fact is explained not by the larger set's axioms, but by the axioms of the smaller set.…”

Chance, determinism, and unsettledness

“…This falls out immediately from accounts like that of (Lange 2009), which defines the laws of nature as those truths the status of which as laws remains stable under arbitrary consistent counterfactual suppositions. Since it is a law that is factive, this stability entails (11).…”

Dynamical versus structural explanations in scientific revolutions

“…A stronger explanatory viewpoint has been defended by Lange (2009Lange ( , 2013aLange ( , 2013b, and can be cashed out in terms of the modal character provided to causal laws by geometrical explanations in terms of the symmetries of spacetime. According to Lange, distinctively mathematical explanations explain "by (roughly) showing how the fact to be explained was inevitable to a stronger degree than could result from the causal powers bestowed by the possession of various properties " (2013b, p. 487-491).…”

“…According to Lange, distinctively mathematical explanations explain "by (roughly) showing how the fact to be explained was inevitable to a stronger degree than could result from the causal powers bestowed by the possession of various properties " (2013b, p. 487-491). If this were the case, structural explanations as characterized in the previous section would explain by conferring to the physical phenomena a sort of necessity that they don't possess; the necessity in question depends on the fact that the spacetime symmetries, among them the relativity principle in mechanics and electromagnetism and the equivalence principle in GTR, are "meta-laws" (Lange 2009). …”