- Principle (disambiguation)
The term "law" is often used to refer to universal principles that describe the fundamental nature of something, to universal properties and relationships between things, or to descriptions that purport to explain these principles and relationships.
"Laws of nature"
For example, "physical laws" such as the "law of gravity" (which is in fact more a "force" than a "law"), or "scientific laws" attempt to describe the fundamental nature of the universe itself. Laws of
mathematics andlogic describe the nature of rational thought and inference (Kant 'stranscendental idealism was precisely a determination of the "a priori" laws governing human thought before any interaction whatsoever with experience).Within most fields of study, and in science in particular, the elevation of some principle of that field to the status of "law" usually takes place after a very long time during which the principle is used and tested and verified; though in some fields of study such laws are simply postulated as a foundation and assumed. Mathematical laws are somewhere in between: they are often arbitrary and unproven in themselves, but they are sometimes judged by how useful they are in making predictions about the real world. However, they ultimately rely on arbitrary
axioms ."Laws" in social sciences
Laws of
economics are an attempt inmodelization of economic behavior.Marxism criticized thebelief in eternal "laws of economics", which it considered a product of the dominant ideology. It claimed that in fact, those so-called "laws of economics" were only the historical laws ofcapitalism , that is of a particular historical social formation. With the advent, in the 20th century, of the application of mathematical, statistical, and experimental techniques to economics, economic theory matured into a corpus of knowledge rooted in the scientific method rather than in philosophical argument.Miscellaneous
Finally, the term is sometimes applied to less rigorous ideas that may be interesting observations or relationships, practical or ethical guidelines (also called rules of thumb), and even humorous parodies of such laws.
Examples of scientific laws include
Boyle's law of gases,conservation law s,Ohm's law , and others. Laws of other fields of study includeOccam's razor as a principle ofphilosophy andSay's law ineconomics . Examples of observed phenomena often described as laws include theTitius-Bode law of planetary positions,Zipf's law of linguistics,Thomas Malthus 's Principle of Population orMalthusian Growth Model ,Moore's law of technological growth. Other laws are pragmatic and observational, such as the law of unintended consequences.Some humorous parodies of such laws include
adage s such asMurphy's law and its many variants, andGodwin's Law ofInternet conversations.ee also
*
Epistemology andphilosophy of science
*Principle of law ,Philosophy of law
*Legal positivism , which states that there is no necessary relation betweenmorality andlaw . Law is thus conceived as the mere product of social conventions. Legal positivism is opposed tonatural law theory and to legal interpretivism.
*Scientific law
*Axiom s andTheorem s
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