Ernest Nagel's The Structure of Science

Author(s): Edward H. Madden

Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1963), pp. 64-70
Published by: University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association
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 DISCUSSION: ERNEST NAGELS THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENCE*]-

EDWARD H. MADDEN

San Yose State College

Let me say at the outset, what no one would have doubted, that Professor Nagel's

book is an excellent one. He offers detailed and clear analyses of many fundamental

problems in the philosophy of science and he throws fresh light on everything he

discusses. The book is a long one and includes many topics, so a useful summary is

impossible. Instead I shall briefly list the topics covered, select one for more detailed

exposition, and finish with some comments.

The unifying thread throughout the book is an analysis of 'explanation'. NageL

begins with a comparison of commonsense and scientific knowledge and follows it

with analyses of the deductive pattern of explanation; the logical character of scientific

laws; experimental laws and theories; the cognitive status of theories; mechanical

explanations; space and geometry; geometry and physics; causality and indeterminism

in physical theory; the concepts of reduction, mechanism, and organismic biology;

and problems of explanation in the social sciences and history.

The topic I want to consider in detail is "the logical character of scientific laws."

I shall give Nagel's views in some detail so his methods of analysis will become clear.

Yet even here I must abstract from the richness of detail and example so the full

flavor of his work will not come through. But enough will show, I am certain, to

convince any person interested in the philosophy of science that he must read this book

fully and carefully. Finally I shall add my own comments and queries.

Not every true statement, Nagel writes, having the form (x). Ax D Bx is a law of

nature. 'All the screws in Smith's car are rusty' is not even a law of nature, to say

nothing of its not being a causal law. The trouble with such a statement, Nagel

continues, is that it is not lawlike (i.e. "a statement which, if true, qualifies for the

designation 'law of nature' "). The philosophical task, then, is to find the characteristics

by virtue of which a statement is lawlike and thus if true a law of nature. However

the term 'law of nature' is notoriously vague, so we must not think we can find a neat

list of necessary and sufficient conditions for 'lawlikeness' and 'true' which will fit

all of its usages. "There is therefore more than an appearance of futility in the recurring

attempts to define with great logical precision what is a law of nature-attempts often

based on the tacit premise that a statement is a law in virtue of its possessing an

inherent 'essence' which the definition must articulate." (p. 49). Yet apparently

much can be done, Nagel believes, to draw the distinction informally.

First, however, we must be completely clear about the prima-facie difference between

accidental and lawful universality. The latter, unlike the former, asserts more, appa-

rently, than defacto universality. E.g., to claim that 'Copper always expands on heating'

is a law of nature, is to claim "not merely that there does not happen to exist such a

piece of copper, but that it is "physically impossible' for such a piece of copper to

exist." (p. 51.) Such universal statements are sometimes said to express a "nomic'

* Received Sept. 1961.

1 New York; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1961.

64

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 ERNEST NAGEL 'S THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENCE 65

universality. Moreover a "universal of law" or a "nomic universal" supports a corres-

ponding subjunctive conditional while an accidental one fails to do so.

These prima facie differences have led some philosophers like Ewing and Broad to

formulate an entailment view of lawlikeness or lawfulness, but Nagel rejects this view.

First, those statements generally called laws in the various sciences are not in point

of fact logically necessary, since their formal denials are demonstrably not self-

contradictory. So the entailment theorist gets into an intolerable dilemma: either he

must deny that these statements are genuine laws (and so fly in the face of science)

or deny that the proofs of their contingency are valid (and so fly in the face of formal

logic). Moreover, if the laws of nature are entailments, then the scientist acts incongru-

ously when he seeks experimental and observational evidence for a supposed law.

"And finally, despite the fact that the statements believed to be laws of nature are

not known to be logically necessary, those statements successfully play the roles in

science that are assigned to them [prediction and explanation]. It is therefore gratuitous

to maintain that unless those statements were logically necessary, they could not do

the tasks which they manifestly do perform." (p. 54.) The confusion which lies at the

root of the entailment view, Nagel believes, is not difficult to uncover. Sometimes a

law of nature which is empirical takes on, in a system of science, a definitional form.

E.g., 'Copper is a good electrical conductor' began as a law but now functions as a

defining property of copper-although, to be sure, the usage now is not always sharply

demarked. In any case, the entailment theorist, being impressed with the "necessary"

nature of such definitions when they do occur in some contexts, inadmissably imputes

such nature to all laws of nature in any context. Moreover, their thesis "that statements

about causes logically imply statements about effects ... confounds the relation of

logical necessity that holds between a set of explanatory premises and the explanadum,

with the contingent relation affirmed by laws contained in these premises." (p. 55, fn.)

Nagel next defends the Humean alternative to the entailment view, namely, that

universals of law can be explicated without employing irreducible modal notions like

"ephysical necessity" or "physical possibility." lie develops, he says, only the outlines

of his essentially Humean interpretation of nomic universality. This interpretation,

we discover, plunges us into the midst of current discussions about lawlikeness and

contrary-to-fact conditionals.

Nagel suggests four logical and epistemological requirements, acceptable within

a Humean framework, which universal conditionals must satisfy if they are to be

construed as lawlike statements and hence, if true, laws of nature. (1) Hempel has

suggested the requirement that lawlike statements must contain only purely qualitative

predicates-that is, predicates which do not require in a statement of their meaning

a reference to any particular object or spatio-temporal location-or else be derivable

from statements which contain only purely qualitative predicates. Thus Kepler's

statements qualify as laws of nature because they are derivable from Newtonian theory.

But, Nagel objects, Kepler's statements were accepted as laws before such derivation

was possible. Moreover, it is not clear that statements like Kepler's are even today

derivable from fundamental laws alone. "There appears to be no way of deducing

the Keplerian laws from Newtonian mechanics and gravitational theory, merely by

substituting constant terms for variables occurring in the latter and without using

additional premises whose predicates are not purely qualitative. ... In effect, therefore

the proposed explication is far too restrictive. ..." (p. 58.) Yet we are on the scent of

an important requirement. Compare 'All the screws in Smith's car are rusty' with the

first Keplerian law 'All planets move on elliptic orbits with the sun at one focus of

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 66 EDWARD H. MADDEN

each ellipse.' While both statements contain names of individuals or predicates that

are not purely qualitative, nevertheless there is a difference between them. "In the

accidental universal, the objects of which the predicate 'rusty during the time period

a' is affirmed ... are severely restricted to things that fall into a specific spatio-temporal

region. In the lawlike statement, the scope of prediction ... is not restricted in this way:

the planets and their orbits are not required to be located in a fixed volume of space or

a given interval of time" (p. 59). Nagel calls a universal whose scope of prediction is

not restricted to objects falling into a fixed spatial region or a particular period of time

an "unrestricted universal." Then he formulates his first criterion of lawlikeness thus:

lawlike sentences must be unrestricted universals.

(2) The first criterion can only be called a necessary, not a sufficient one, since an

unrestricted universal conditional may be vacuously true when nothing at all satisfies

the antecedent clause. In order to remedy this fault one might restrict 'lawlikeness'

to cases where we know that there is at least one object which satisfies its antecedent.

Yet this restriction will not do since we would say that 'All copper wire at minus

2700 C temperature is a good conductor of electricity' is a law even though we may

not know in fact whether there are any such pieces of wire at that temperature. We

accept it as a law, of course, indirectly because it is a consequence of the ostensible

law that all copper is a good electric conductor, for which there is considerable evidence.

Thus Nagel is able to formulate his second criterion of 'lawlike': "The vacuous

truth of an unrestricted universal is not sufficient for counting it a law; it counts as a

law only if there is a set of other assumed laws from which the universal is logically

derivable" (p. 60). But aren't some fundamental laws of science, like Newton's first

law of motion, known to be vacuously true? Nagel thinks not. C... it is a gross over-

simplification to claim that the law is vacuously true; for the law is an element in a

system of laws for which there are certainly confirmatory instances. More generally,

if an 'ultimate' law were vacuously satisfied it would be difficult to understand what

use it would have in the system of which it is a part." (p. 62.)

(3) Further analysis of accidental universals like 'All the screws in Smith's car are

rusty' reveals a third criterion of lawlikeness. This universal statement is simply an

economical way of asserting a finite conjunction of statements, each conjunct being

a statement about a particular screw in a finite class of screws. In this case, the evidence

for asserting the universal statement exhausts the class of objects and the class is such

that it cannot be augmented. Thus, Nagel writes, for an unrestricted universal to be

called a law "it is a plausible requirement that the evidence for it is not known to

concide with its scope of predication and that, moreover, its scope is not known to be

closed to any further augmentation" (p. 63).

(4) The fourth criterion is a bit more complicated-indeed, Nagel says, it is difficult

even to formulate it as a "requirement" that lawlike statements must invariably

satisfy. This criterion is epistemological, not logical, and bears on the standing which

laws have in the whole body of our knowledge. We need to examine it in some detail.

The evidential support for a law may be either direct or indirect. Direct support,

of course, occurs where all the examined instances possess the property predicated by

L. Indirect support occurs where instances of a same-level law transfer a sort of

confirmation to L through a higher-level law which deductively unifies the same-

level laws. (Nagel also distinguishes another, related sense of indirect evidence.)

"There is often a strong disinclination to call a universal conditional L a 'law of nature,'

despite the fact that it satisfies the various conditions already discussed, if the only

available evidence for L is direct evidence. ... Accordingly, in the absence of known

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 ERNEST NAGEL 'S THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENCE 67

laws in terms of which the black color of ravens can be explained, with the consequent

absence of a comprehensive variety of indirect evidence for the statement that all

ravens are black, our attitude to this statement is less firmly settled than it is toward

statements called laws for which such indirect evidence is available." (p. 66.) Moreover,

negative evidence functions quite differently in the two cases. Negative evidence

easily eliminates a law which has been supported only by direct evidence. But negative

evidence will often be re-interpreted in various ways to avoid eliminating a law for

which there is much indirect evidence, since to eliminate such a law strikes at the

heart and foundations of a whole science. Thus almost, if not quite, we have another

criterion. We generally tend to call a universal conditional a law of nature if we are

disposed to reinterpret apparently negative evidence so as to retain the statement as

an integral part of our knowledge.

Nagel concludes his discussion of lawlikeness with a qualification. We must not think

the above four criteria, plus the requirement of truth, are sufficient grounds for saying

a statement is a law. No doubt statements can be invented which are not lawlike but

nevertheless satisfy these requirements. Indeed not all of the requirements are even

necessary conditions for ascribing lawfulness. Statements which we would call laws

can be found, probably, which fail to satisfy one or more of these conditions. This is

inevitable, he says, "for a precise explication of the meaning of 'law of nature' which

will be in agreement with every use of this vague expression is not possible" (p. 68).

Nevertheless Nagel thinks these criteria are important because they show that the

Humean can distinguish between accidental and nomic universals and thus that his

critics are wrong.

Even so, there is still a trouble spot in his Humean analysis, he admits. The most

impressive current criticism of such analyses is that de facto universals cannot support

subjunctive conditionals and thus fail to qualify as nomic universals. He meets this

criticism in two ways. First, many de facto universals are eliminated as lawlike by the

four criteria and hence of course do not support corresponding subjunctive condi-

tionals. Second, a de facto universal may be asserted to be true within a context of

assumptions which themselves make dubious the subjunctive conditional. The

universals left over, so to speak, qualify as non-accidental ones and do support the

required corresponding subjunctive inference. If this is so, the Humean analysis is

adequate, and the stronger sense of nomic universality, that is, an irreducible non-

logical sense of 'necessity', is unnecessary.

From this discussion of subjunctive conditionals as they affect a Humean analysis

of lawfulness, Nagel, with great care and qualification, goes on to formulate a general

view of counter-factual inference in its own right. "More generally, a counterfactual

can be interpreted as an implicit metalinguistic statement (i.e., a statement about

other statements, and in particular about the logical relations of these other statements)

asserting that the indicative form of its consequent clause follows logically from the

indicative form of its antecedent clause, when the latter is conjoined with some law

and the requisite initial conditions for the law" (p. 72).

Nagel concludes his chapter on the Logical Character of Scientific Laws by a

careful analysis of laws into causal, syndromatic, developmental, statistical, and

functional ones.

I agree wholeheartedly with Nagel's criticisms of the entailment view and have

little to say about them. Yet there is one puzzling feature of ordinary usage which

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68 EDWARD H. MADDEN

never seems to be explicated adequately by a Humean analysis of 'law' and 'cause'.

Whenever we discover that an expected event fails to occur we automatically say,

<'I didn't have the cause, after all, although I thought I did." Certainly one would never

say, "I know that's the cause. This time the relationship just broke down. And I

might have expected it some time or other since they aren't necessarily related."

The heart of the chapter, of course, is Nagel's own Humean sort of distinction

between accidental and lawlike universals. I shall comment on his criteria seriatim.

(1) Nagel's criticisms of Hempel's concept of purely qualitative predicate are right,

I believe, but I wonder if his alternative requirement of "unrestricted universality"

is a tight enough one. To be sure, 'All the screws in Smith's car are rusty' is more

severely restricted to things that fall into a specific spatiotemporal region than 'All

planets move on elliptic orbits with the sun at one focus of each ellipse.' But this does

not prove that the latter is not also restricted, although less so, spatiotemporally. But

Nagel appears to think so since he generalizes in his criterion beyond what the dis-

tinction establishes: "lawlike sentences," he says, "must be unrestricted universals."

What he is entitled to say is simply "must not be severely restricted." But it is difficult

to see how such a loose criterion as this would be helpful.

(2) This criterion is designed to eliminate the paradoxical results of material impli-

cation and seems perfectly adequate. The perceptive reader will notice that the way

he handles this problem foreshadows, in part, how he will eventually meet the problem

of counterfactual inference. Moreover, both here and there he masterfully avoids

the pitfall so many analysts make of assuming that a sentence of lawfulness or counter-

factual inference must be analysed by a single sentence, or, as some say, must be trans-

cribed into an ideal language by specifying a synonym or analogue there. Nagel sees

clearly that this view must be avoided by any Humean who hopes to formulate an

adequate analysis of lawfulness and counter factual inference.

(3) Consider a bottle of arsenic. I might say 'All people who drink heartily from this

bottle die' and insist it is lawful in Nagel's sense since it allows the subjunctive infe-

rence, "If x were to drink from this bottle of arsenic he would die." Of course, only a

few people drinking would soon consume the bottle. The class of people drinking

from this bottle of arsenic, then, cannot be further augmented. Since the scope of

predication cannot be augmented and yet the sentence is lawful, we apparently have a

counter-example. One might argue nevertheless that it isn't a genuine counter-example

since the evidence for the truth of this statement would not simply coincide with the

instances of people drinking from this bottle and dying. We know something about

chemical theory! To be sure, but in this case we see, then, that the impossibility of

augmentation and the exhaustiveness of instantial evidence are not simply two parts of

one criterion. And yet, as far as I can tell, Nagel presents them together as one criterion.

(4) Consider my revision of Chisholm's Dionne example as a counter-example of

this requirement. The statement (1) 'All firstborn Canadian quintuplets born between

the World Wars are named Dionne' (where 'firstborn' means 'the first to be born')

is certainly a nonlaw statement. But (2) 'All North-American-more-than-four-tuplets

born between the World Wars are named Dionne' apparently has the same relation to

(1), say, that 'All animals are mortal' has to 'All men are mortal.' (2) is not only a

higher level hypothesis relative to (1) but is also supported by evidence which is not

direct evidence for (1)-e.g., by finding, say, some second-born North-American

quintuplet to be named Dionne. Thus, one might say, paraphrasing this criterion,

(1) is supported not solely by the direct evidence that all firstborn Canadian quintuplets

have been named Dionne but also by being deduced from the higher-level hypothesis

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 ERNEST NAGEL 'S THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENCE 69

(2), the evidence for (2) being that all second-born have been named Dionne, etc.

And one could, of course, make the predicate of (2) as general as he pleased, e.g.,

by writing 'have names beginning with the letter D' or 'have names beginning with a

letter between the letters C and H.' Thus, paradoxically, on this criterion (1) turns out

to be lawful. One might reply that this is not a genuine counter-example because it

violates Nagel's first requirement-that is, it is not an unrestricted universal. But

we have already seen that there are certain difficulties with this requirement. In any

case, Nagel's reply would be more direct. He is not claiming, you recall, that his four

requirements are sufficient (or that each is even necessary) grounds for calling a

universal statement a law. In short, he admits perfectly well the possibility of counter-

examples. Yet in so doing he seems to me to abandon the concept of lawlikeness-and

that is all to the good! This point is a pivotal one and requires further thought.

What, after all, does the notion of 'lawlike' mean? Apparently it refers to the form

(logical and epistemological) that any sentence must have in order to qualify, if true,

as a law. Various necessary and sufficient criteria of this form have been offered

by different authors but they are always apparently eliminated by counter-examples.

To soften conditions and say that they aren't necessary and sufficient criteria, as Nagel

does, seems, then, to give up the very notion of lawlikeness. I believe Nagel is right;

they aren't necessary and sufficient conditions. But then let us get rid of the concept

which requires them to be. Do not conclude that I think Nagel's requirements useless.

I think the "logical" ones are, since they are too close to the original demands of the

concept of lawlikeness. But his epistemological requirements are very excellent

analyses, it seems to me, of some of the ways in which scientists as a matter of fact

do distinguish laws (not true lawlike statements) from accidental universal statements.

Scientists use all sorts of criteria, some on one occasion, different ones on others, and

combinations on still others. They sometimes call certain universal statements laws,

e.g., when they fit into an established body of knowledge or connect well with what

we already know, when they have predictive and explanatory power, when they

contain theoretical terms or are logically related to one that does, when they occur in

a model theory, when they fill in spatiotemporal gaps, when different types of instances

confirm them, and even when only the multiplication of instances confirms them.

(The presumption, in short, is that any generalization is a law unless there is good

counter-evidence. Thus epistemological relations are important in deciding not only

what counts as a law but what counts as an accidental universal too.) The clarification

of all these ways of deciding about lawfulness is not only not useless but crucial to

any advancement of the philosophy of science. And Nagel, in various places in the

book, makes good headway in such clarification.

Moreover, this new way of looking at lawfulness helps a Humean like Nagel in his

own defense. Philosophers from Reid on have claimed that the Humean cannot

distinguish lawful and accidental correlations, but this strategy of theirs seems to me

altogether wrong. If the Humean cannot make such a distinction, neither can the

entailment theorist. The latter advance no new way of knowing what is a law; he comes

to calling a statement a law in the very ways we have been talking about. If he didn't,

then he would never know that he had a law in the entailment sense he wishes to give

to it. Given his evidence that he has a law, he is then free on other philosophical

grounds to give it an entailment interpretation. But he is not free to build his case on

the Humean's alleged inability to distinguish laws from other universal statements.

This tactic undercuts his own position.

Let me finish this part of the discussion by saying I have not so much been dis-

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70 EDWARD H. MADDEN

agreeing with Professor Nagel-indeed I think his view that there are no sufficient

criteria is crucially right-as I have been contending that his premises allow of a

stronger conclusion than he draws.

I have no room to comment on Professor Nagel's analysis of counterfactual inference,

although it should be clear from what I said about his second criterion and other

matters that I am thoroughly in accord with it. Morevoer, his classification of laws is

extremely penetrating. I found his analysis of two types of functional law particularly

interesting.

Finally, I want to emphasize the richness of Professor Nagel's book. I have examined

carefully only one topic and even here omitted much, so that the extent and detail

of the work is inadequately suggested. It would be wise to look again at the list of

topics which I gave at the beginning of this discussion. Both the specialist and beginner

in the philosophy of science will find Nagel's thorough treatment of this wide range of

topics rewarding reading indeed.

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