Idealization and the Laws of Nature

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PHILOSOPHY

Billy Wheeler

Idealization
and the Laws of
Nature
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Billy Wheeler

Idealization and the Laws

of Nature

123
Billy Wheeler
Department of Philosophy
Sun Yat-Sen University
Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

ISSN 2211-4548 ISSN 2211-4556 (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-319-99563-2 ISBN 978-3-319-99564-9 (eBook)
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This book is dedicated to the memory of Peter
Lipton and Joan Ruth Perriman
Foreword

In this book, Dr. Wheeler presents an original account of laws that brings the
relatively minor issue of idealization to the centre of the debate and shows how
strongly it is related to the far more prominent issue of simplicity. This reimagining
of the debate suggests the application of algorithmic information theory as a formal
mathematical theory which deals with simplicity. Using algorithmic information
theory is not entirely novel—although it is rarely done—but Dr. Wheeler goes back
to the historical ideas and shows us how the theory, designed to capture simplicity,
can also be used to address idealization.
This book advances the growing interest in using informational and computa-
tional methods in philosophy of science. More personally, the outcome of the new
account which strikes me as most interesting is the possibility of intertwining the
epistemology and metaphysics of laws in a substantive way. The difficulty of
achieving this is arguably a major reason many philosophers of science have lost
interest in laws, and Dr. Wheeler offers us a possible way back.
Finally, Dr. Wheeler gives us a book which examines and builds complex ideas
with enviable clarity. In all, this is quite an achievement for a first book.

London, UK Phyllis Illari

March 2017

vii
Preface

Philosophers have known for some time that our most successful scientific laws do
not describe perfectly the observed behaviour of the world. As an example, consider
the law of the pendulum:
sffiffiffi
l
T ¼ 2p
g

As any high school science student can tell you, this law only accurately
describes the behaviour of an ‘ideal pendulum’, one which is subject to no friction,
has an infinitely long cord, and whose mass is concentrated at a single point. For
practicing scientists, the fact real-world pendulums and other oscillating bodies do
not meet these ideal standards seems to be of little concern. Engineers can work
around them by making suitable approximations, and precise values, when they are
needed, can be calculated by both minimizing the effect of friction and other
influences, or by working out their effect mathematically and adjusting the law
suitably.
That no real-world physical system can be constructed to meet the ideal stan-
dards of many laws is rarely a problem for scientists. Things are much harder to
explain for philosophers of science, however, who themselves have been working
under an idealization about the nature of laws and how they relate to the world. It is
often assumed that whatever else a law of nature is, it provides a statement that is
universally true. This then raises a conundrum for philosophers: how should we
treat the exceptions that appear in nature? Do they show that our best current laws
are not, in fact, genuine laws of nature? Do they show that laws can be true without
correctly describing physical behaviour? Or do they show that laws can be both
false and lawlike at the same time?
Most of the philosophical debate about exceptions has taken place around the
idea of a ‘ceteris paribus law’. Such laws are false and exception-ridden when given
in their simple form, but true and exceptionless when hedged with a so-called
‘ceteris paribus proviso’. Typically, if the law says ‘Fs are Gs’, then the hedged

ix
x Preface

ceteris paribus laws says ‘All else being equal, Fs are Gs’. As is well known in the
field, ceteris paribus laws give rise to serious problems of their own: the most
famous being how to interpret ‘all else being equal’ in a way that does not make the
law a tautology. Whilst I do not doubt that ceteris paribus laws can be found in
numerous scientific fields, I believe the attention they have received by philoso-
phers has been disproportionate. This is because laws which are about ‘ideal sys-
tems’, such as the law of the pendulum, are not easily cast in terms of ceteris
paribus provisos. In fact, there are a number of key differences that justify sepa-
rating ideal laws from ceteris paribus laws.
Take, for example, Nancy Cartwright’s classic example of a ceteris paribus law
‘aspirins relieve headaches’. This law has many instances (taking aspirin often
really does relieve a headache) even if we cannot specify clearly why it fails when it
does. Compare this with an ideal law, like the law of the pendulum. This law has no
instances in nature (because we cannot reduce friction to zero or have an infinitely
long cord) and conversely to the aspirin law, we can state clearly the conditions
needed for the law to obtain. Ideal laws seem to belong to a different class of
exception-ridden laws to ceteris paribus laws, and it is not initially obvious that one
can be reduced to the other.
This book provides the first full-length discussion of ideal laws and how they
ought to be understood metaphysically. It turns out that many of the most famous
theories of lawhood, such as Armstrong’s ‘nomic necessitation view’ and Lewis’
‘best system account’, fail to explain why there are ideal laws in scientific theories.
By tracing through the problems with existing theories of lawhood, a new expla-
nation of ideal laws is proposed. It will be argued that only by thinking of laws of
nature as algorithms whose purpose is to compress empirical data, can we fully
understand what an ideal law is and why they are so prevalent in scientific theories.
This theory is inspired by David Braddon-Mitchell’s paper ‘Lossy Laws’. There he
argued that the best system account can be improved if axioms are allowed to have
exceptions by analogy to lossy compression in computer science. I agree with
Braddon-Mitchell, but the theory I put forward is much broader in that it abandons
Lewis’ commitment to laws as statements in favour of a theory which identifies
them as algorithms. In this respect, it has a lot more in common with the
‘inference-ticket view’, originally held by logical empiricists such as Moritz Schlick
and Gilbert Ryle.
In Chap. 1, I closely examine the origin of the debate surrounding exceptions to
laws and critically evaluate some supposed solutions to the problem, such as that of
‘hedging’, ‘concretization’ and ‘nomic elimination’. It turns out that there is no easy
solution to the problem of ideal laws, and that the only way to fully understand
what they are and why they should exist in scientific theory is to examine their
metaphysics.
Chapter 2 presents accounts of the metaphysics of ideal laws from the ‘gov-
erning conception’, which understands laws to be necessary and determining of the
regularities observed in nature. Three governing conceptions of laws will be dis-
cussed: those of David Armstrong, Cartwright and Brian Ellis. I will show that
Preface xi

whilst some of these theories have success in accommodating ceteris paribus laws,
they fail disastrously when extended to cover ideal laws as well.
The opposite of the governing conception is the ‘non-governing conception’ of
laws, sometimes called ‘Humean’, and Chap. 3 will focus on solutions to ideal laws
from this tradition. Again, three accounts of ideal laws will be proposed based on
three different non-governing conceptions of lawhood: Lewis’ original best system
account, the so-called ‘better best system account’ recently put forward by Markus
Schrenk and Matthias Unterhuber, and the ‘inference-ticket view’ of Schlick and
Ryle. It turns out that non-governing conceptions have much better success than
existing governing conceptions in accounting for why ideal laws should be so
important to science. However, none of the three discussed can currently provide a
full picture.
Chapter 4 presents an algorithmic theory of laws which takes the best of the best
system account and the inference-ticket view. It is argued that Ernst Mach’s
explanation of theories as efficient representations of nature provides the best
explanation for why there are ideal laws in science, and the algorithmic theory
provides the right metaphysical foundation for this view. When the algorithmic
theory is combined with Braddon-Mitchell’s distinction between lossless and lossy
compression, then ideal laws are identified with the lossy algorithmic compressors
of scientific theories. On this picture science, and in particular scientific theories, are
seen as a solution to a problem: how best to encode all empirical data. By analogy
with data compression in computer science, lossy compression is sometimes
desirable when there is redundancy in data quality. I introduce the concept of
predictive redundancy by analogy to perceptual redundancy in image compressors
such as JPEG and explain ideal laws as the inevitable result of predictive redun-
dancy in scientific theories.
What emerges is a new explanation of idealization and ideal laws in science that
provides indirect support for the algorithmic theory as an answer to what it means to
be a ‘law of nature’.

Zhuhai, China Billy Wheeler

Acknowledgements

There are many people who, without whom, this book would not have been pos-
sible. This book began life as my Ph.D. thesis entitled The Metaphysics of Ideal
Laws and I am grateful to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council who
provided a studentship to complete this research in 2007–2011 (award number
133769). I am also indebted to King's College Cambridge which provided both
financial assistance and accommodation in 2012. I have benefitted immensely from
the research community in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the
University of Cambridge. I am particularly grateful to the Philosophy Workshop
which volunteered one of their sessions to read David Braddon-Mitchell’s ‘Lossy
Laws’ paper and for helping me take seriously the idea that laws might be com-
pression algorithms.
I owe a huge debt to the late Peter Lipton, first for agreeing to be my Ph.D.
supervisor and second for getting me interested in the topic of idealization. Without
Tim Lewens agreeing to take me and my project on after Peter’s passing, this book
would not exist. I am therefore especially grateful to him and the hard work and
effort he put into me during my years at Cambridge and especially afterwards,
where he has continued to be a source of guidance and inspiration. Many others
have helped shape the ideas and arguments in this book. I particularly wish to thank
Alex Broadbent, Mark Sprevak, Martin Kusch, Hugh Mellor, Helen Beebee, Anna
Alexandrova and Phyllis Illari, who have all provided philosophical input at some
stage during its development. I also wish to thank two anonymous referees from
Springer who gave helpful comments on the structure and layout of the material in
the manuscript.
Equally important in shaping my writings into something resembling a readable
book was David Murphy. Thank you also to friends and family for putting up with
me during testing times and for providing the encouragement to get through them.
Much of this book was typed at University College London and Anglia Ruskin
University and I am thankful for the use of their facilities and staff.

xiii
Contents

1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 The Received View of Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1 The Ubiquity of Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.2 Tracing the Development of the Received View . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Enter Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.1 Galileo’s Idealizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.2 Hempel, Cartwright and Giere on Physical Laws . . . . . . . . 5
1.2.3 Fodor and Schiffer on Special Science Laws . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2.4 Taking Exceptions Seriously: Braddon-Mitchell
and Schrenk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.3 Skeptical Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3.1 Hedging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3.2 Concretization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.3.3 Selectivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3.4 Nomic Eliminativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.4 A Taxonomy of Non-universal Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.4.1 Type-A: Ideal Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.4.2 Type-B: Ceteris Paribus Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.4.3 Type-C: Chancy Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2 Governing Law Solutions to Ideal Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1 Laws as Relations of Nomic Necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.1 Armstrong’s Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1.2 Iron Versus Oaken Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.1.3 Ideal Laws and Uninstantiated Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.2 Laws as Ascriptions of Capacities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.2.1 Cartwright’s Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.2.2 Capacities for Ideal Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.2.3 Hüttemann’s Capacities for Ideal Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

xv
xvi Contents

2.3 Scientific Essentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

2.3.1 Idealization as a Means to Uncover Essential Natures . . . . 45
2.3.2 The Problem of Abstraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3 Non-governing Law Solutions to Ideal Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.1 The Best System Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.1.1 Laws as Axioms in a Deductive System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.1.2 Considerations from Strength . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.1.3 Considerations from Simplicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.2 Better Best System Accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2.1 Schrenk’s Special Science Index Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2.2 Unterhuber’s Generic Construal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.3 The Inference-Ticket View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.3.1 Statements of Fact or Rules of Inference? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.3.2 Problems for the Inference-Ticket View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4 The Algorithmic Theory of Laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.1 Science and Data Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.1.1 Simplicity and Economy in Scientific Theory . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.1.2 Compression as an Understanding of Simplicity . . . . . . . . 82
4.1.3 Laws as Compression Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
4.2 The Theory Outlined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
4.2.1 Algorithmic Information Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
4.2.2 Laws of Nature as Maximal Compressors . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.2.3 Objectivity and the Trivialization Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
4.3 Idealization and Lossy Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
4.3.1 Lossy Compression in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
4.3.2 Predictive Redundancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
4.3.3 Theory-Driven Data Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Chapter 1
Laws of Nature and the Problem
of Exceptions

1.1 The Received View of Laws

1.1.1 The Ubiquity of Laws

The concept of a ‘law of nature’ plays an important role in scientific, philosophical

and folk explanations of the natural world. Since at least the seventeenth century,
many theoretical discoveries in science have been given the title of ‘law’; famous
examples include Galileo’s law of the pendulum, Newton’s laws of motion and
gravity and Darwin’s law of natural selection. In fact, it seems one of the best ways
to become immortalized in the history of science is to have a law named after
oneself. But the concept of a law of nature also plays a vital role in philosophical
understanding, particularly metaphysics. We find the idea appealed to in framing
debates surrounding freewill and determinism, causation, counterfactuals and time.
The idea of a law of nature is so pervasive that it is even found in folk explanations
of the world: statements like ‘what goes up, must come down’, ‘the taller they are
the harder they fall’ and the so-called ‘Sod’s law’—whilst not taken to be genuine
laws of nature by scientists and philosophers—fulfil a similar function in being used
to explain and predict events around us.
What makes laws so useful is their universality: a law is said to hold for all times
and for all places. It is because laws are universal that they can be relied upon to
make predictions about what will happen and what would have happened, had
things been different. It is commonly assumed that the world is an orderly place,
and excluding some quantum phenomena, things do not just happen at random but
follow strict rules or principles. It is this orderliness of nature, and the laws which
underpin it, that have made science so successful. Not just successful in explaining
and predicting the world, but in manipulating it to our own advantage. There is a
close connection between the discovery of laws and technological innovation.
Without knowledge of the gas laws precise construction of the steam engine would

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 1

part of Springer Nature 2018
B. Wheeler, Idealization and the Laws of Nature, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99564-9_1
2 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

not have been possible and neither would it have been possible to land a man on the
moon without Newton’s laws of motion and gravity.
It would seem then that laws are indispensable for a full understanding of the
methods and results of scientific inquiry. Yet in spite of this, there exists a wave of
philosophers who are willing to question the significance of laws, with some going
so far as to say the concept of law has no correlation in real scientific theories and
provides an unhelpful distortion of scientific practice. (Cf. Giere 1999; van Fraassen
1989; Cartwright 1999). A number of different reasons have been given to support
this claim. One argument relies on the fact that, despite appearances, scientific laws
are in fact not universal. Many scientific laws, it is alleged, have exceptions: they
only hold universally true in ‘ideal circumstances’ or ‘when all else is equal’ or are
only ‘approximately true’. Since it is often said to be a conceptual requirement of
laws of nature that they are universal, whatever scientific laws are, they cannot be
laws of nature.
The main argument of this book will be that having exceptions is no barrier to
scientific laws expressing genuine laws of nature because laws of nature can
themselves admit of exceptions. Nature, it will be argued, contains both universal
and non-universal laws. It turns out that there is more than one kind of
non-universal law and this book will focus on understanding the metaphysics of just
one of these kinds: ideal laws. These are laws which hold only in ‘ideal’ circum-
stances. What separates these laws from other non-universal laws is that these ideal
circumstances cannot be expected to be realized in the course of nature. In the
remaining sections of this chapter I will give detail to what I mean by an ‘ideal law’
and what makes them different to other non-universal laws. Given that the view that
laws are universal is so intuitive and widely adopted, it will be useful to begin first
with a brief history of the development of the concept of a law of nature.

1.1.2 Tracing the Development of the Received View

The interesting fact about the concept of a law of nature is that it arose relatively
late in mankind’s theorizing about the natural world. Few references can be found
in classical Greek and Roman thinkers (Milton 1981, p. 173) and the concept of a
law as natural order was used in a very different sense in ancient Indian (Mohanty
2000, pp. 73–83) and Chinese philosophy (Needham 1951). Most identify René
Descartes (1596–1650) as the first natural philosopher of the modern period to
explicitly formulate their results in terms of ‘nature’s laws’; but by the time of Isaac
Newton (1643–1727) the concept had become a mainstream feature in scientific
treatises.
Why did the concept of law arrive so late in European thinking? One of the
earliest explanations comes from Zilsel (1942). According to him, the concept of
law became commonplace in the seventeenth century because it coincided with an
expansion of commerce and free enterprise in European society. Craftsman from
numerous industries would keep ‘standards’ and ‘rules’—precise principles of
1.1 The Received View of Laws 3

measurement used in the construction of artefacts. This notion, Zilsel believed,

found its way into the speculations of thinkers about the natural world. Zilsel also
accepted a position—developed further by Needham (1951)—that the natural world
was governed by the laws of a ‘divine being’ who ruled over nature in much the
same way that a monarch rules over a political state. Certainly we can find refer-
ences to God as the giver of natural laws in Kepler, Descartes and Newton—but
there are exceptions to this. For example, there is evidence that Roger Bacon
(1214–1292)—although writing much earlier than the mechanists of the scientific
revolution—used the term in a purely descriptive manner to describe what does
happen and not what must happen (Ruby 1986).
Zilsel and Needham’s explanation for the origin of the concept of law has not
been universally accepted. The historian of science Milton (1981) argues that
craftsmen had long been around in ancient times, so this could not account for the
sudden introduction of the idea (1981, p. 179). In addition, the kind of absolute
monarchy required to cement the idea of a forceful edict had long since vanished in
Europe by the time of the scientific revolution, as most central European monarchs
had devolved some of the power to their parliaments (1981, p. 180). It might also be
added that absolute monarchies had existed in Eastern cultures; yet this seems to
have had little impact on the concepts used there to describe the natural world
which, for the most part, was governed by the wills of nature spirits, superhuman
gods or Karma.
This is not to say that all scientists, even after Descartes, agreed that the natural
world should be thought of as obeying a set of laws. Although he is most
well-known for his gas ‘laws’, Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was famously suspicious
of the notion of a law of nature writing: ‘A law, being but a notional rule of acting
according to the declared will of a superior, it is plain that nothing but an intel-
lectual being can be properly capable of receiving and acting by a law’ (1686,
p. 181 as quoted in Ott 2009, p. 151). If the laws of nature are supposed to function
in a similar way to legal proclamations, Boyle could not see how this could explain
the behavior of inanimate objects, which surely lack the intelligence and agency to
understand and follow such rules. Galileo (1564–1642) too refrained from
describing his results in terms of ‘laws’ of nature, preferring the Latin term ‘regula’
which is usually translated as ‘principle’ or ‘standard’.
Apart from these few exceptions, however, the concept of a law of nature as
something that governs the behavior of the world did become commonplace in
scientific theorizing. By the time of the nineteenth century the idea had become
secularized in the minds of scientists and philosophers, where laws were somehow
both part of and determined the behavior of the natural world. It is this secularized
concept of law that I will be investigating. The ‘received view’ is an appropriate
name (after Reutlinger and Unterhuber 2014) because it is the one philosophers
have ‘received’ from scientific practice. This is true regardless of the exact details
about how the concept arose in scientific theorizing in the first place.
The received view has two components to it: a methodological component and a
metaphysical component. It will be useful to have these laid out in a relatively
4 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

formal fashion so we can be clear on which assumptions are being denied by the
arguments explored throughout the book.
Methodological Component:
(i) The discovery of laws is one of the main aims of science.
(ii) Scientists represent laws of nature using statements of universal scope.
(iii) Scientists confirm these statements using empirical evidence.
(iv) Laws play an important role in scientific explanation, prediction, and
counterfactual reasoning.
Metaphysical Component:
(i) Laws of nature are universal: they are true for all times and at all places.
(ii) Laws of nature are propositions whose truth-makers are states-of-affairs in
the physical world.
(iii) It is a contingent fact what the laws of nature are—i.e., there is a possible
world where the laws of nature are different to our own.
(iv) Laws of nature are objective and exist mind-independently.
Philosophers of science and metaphysicians have formulated theories of laws
which do not agree with the received view in all respects. The question seems to be
can one deny one or more of the metaphysical components whilst still allowing the
use of the concept in making sense of key methodological practices in science? Do
the methodological and metaphysical components come apart and, if they do,
should the received view be abandoned altogether? It is part one of the meta-
physical component—that the laws are universal—which forms the basis for much
recent discussion on this question.

1.2 Enter Exceptions

1.2.1 Galileo’s Idealizations

The awareness that some laws have exceptions if taken as universal truths goes
back to when the concept began to take hold in experimental science. As we have
already seen, Galileo himself preferred to use the term ‘rule’ in describing his
results; but he, nonetheless, just like others who adopted the concept of law, thought
his results held without exception. No sooner had Galileo presented some of his
results, there were dissenters. Galileo is famously known for his law of the pen-
dulum, viz., that the time period for a complete oscillation depends neither on the
mass of the pendulum nor on the amplitude of the swing. This law only holds for an
‘ideal pendulum’; real world pendulums are subject to impeding forces that prevent
the relationship from being fully realized:
The simple pendulum is an idealization of a real pendulum. It consists of a point mass, m,
attached to an infinitely light rigid rod of length l that is itself attached to a frictionless pivot
1.2 Enter Exceptions 5

point. If displaced from its vertical equilibrium position, this idealized pendulum will
oscillate with constant amplitude forever. There is no damping of the motion from friction
at the pivot or from air molecules impinging on the rod. (Baker and Blackburn 2005, p. 9)

It came as no surprise to Galileo then when one of his contemporaries—the

engineer Guildobaldo Del Monte (1545–1607)—took issue with his ‘rule’ after
attempting to verify it by dropping ball bearings around an iron loop (Matthews
2004). Although Del Monte’s criticism was not aimed at the use of laws in pre-
senting scientific findings, Galileo’s response is nevertheless telling about his
attitude towards the so-called exceptions. According to Galileo, if one wants to test
the rule then one must allow for the ‘impediments’ which prevent it from holding
without error:
When he wants to recognize in the concrete the effects which he has proved in the abstract,
[he] must allow for the impediments of matter, and if he is able to do so, I assure that things
are in no less agreement than are arithmetical computations. The errors lie, then, not in the
abstractness or the concreteness, not in geometry or physics as such, but in the calculator
who does not know how to keep good accounts. (1632, p. 207. Quoted in McMullin 1985,
p. 251)

From this passage it is clear that Galileo would not have thought his rule had
exceptions—any appearance to the contrary comes down to the fact the experi-
menter had failed to take into account the impediments that prevent the relationship
from being observed. Only if one is unaware (as perhaps Del Monte was) of the
conditions that need to be met for the law, does it look like it has exceptions.
Galileo’s response to the appearance of exceptions became the standard one
adopted by scientists ever since and helped legitimize the use of abstraction and
idealization in the sciences. Del Monte used exceptions in order to refute Galileo’s
rules, but recent philosophers of science have used them to question the very nature
of lawhood itself.

1.2.2 Hempel, Cartwright and Giere on Physical Laws

The contemporary debate over the problem of exceptions starts in 1959 when
Michael Scriven wrote ‘the most interesting fact about laws of nature is that they are
virtually all known to be in error’ (1959, p. 91). He continues:
If one asks for a few examples of laws of nature, a dozen of the most frequent answers
would include Newton’s laws of motion, gravitation, and cooling; Boyle’s or Charles’ gas
laws, the first or second laws of thermodynamics, Snell’s law (of optical refraction);
Hooke’s law (of elasticity); the law of mass action in chemistry; Kepler’s laws (of planetary
motion). Certainly these are the examples which students of physics using current textbooks
are introduced to as laws. But none of these meet the definition, because none are true as
stated. (1959, p. 91)

Scriven’s argument was that current ‘textbook laws’ found in science couldn’t be
said to have captured the real laws of nature, for none are universal as stated—all
6 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

are known to have exceptions. Scriven’s observation was little noticed and the
problem of exceptions did not begin to garner mainstream attention until Carl
Hempel discussed it in his 1988 paper ‘Provisoes: a problem concerning the
inferential function of scientific theories’. Hempel’s concern was different to
Scriven’s. Whereas Scriven was worried about the form of scientific laws, Hempel
was interested in the structure of theories and how we should model their confir-
mation through successful prediction. In particular, exceptions pose a threat to a
simple deductive view of confirmation whereby prediction is merely the activity of
inferring observation statements from a purported law. Hempel illustrates this using
the laws of magnetism:
The theory clearly allows for the possibility that two bar magnets, suspended by fine
threads close to each other at the same level, will not arrange themselves in a straight line;
for example, if a magnetic field of suitable direction should be present in addition, then the
bars would orientate themselves so as to be parallel to each other; similarly, a strong air
current would foil the prediction, and so forth. The theory of magnetism does not guarantee
the absence of such disturbing factors…I will use the term ‘provisoes’ to refer to
assumptions of the kind just illustrated, which are essential, but generally unstated, pre-
suppositions of theoretical inferences. (1988, p. 150)

The laws of magnetism, according to Hempel, do not by themselves allow for

deductive inferences about what would happen to two magnets close to one another.
Even if initial and boundary conditions are taken into account, certain other tacit
assumptions (‘provisoes’) are made, e.g., that no other magnets or forces are
present, which is not part of the content of the law itself. Hempel concluded that the
use of provisos in scientific practice therefore undermines a purely syntactic or
deductive view about how scientists use and confirm scientific laws.
The next group of philosophers to pay serious attention to exceptions were
Cartwright (1983, 1989, 1999) and Giere (1988, 1999, 2004). They take similar
lessons from the existence of exceptions but differ in how radical their results are
for the received view. Cartwright put exceptions centre stage in her philosophy of
science, but unlike those before her, showed that exceptions can be found to laws in
a range of scientific fields. However, it is her views on the fundamental laws of
physics that have been most controversial. According to her, laws like Newton’s
law of gravitation literally ‘lie’ if they are presented as universal truths:
Does this law truly describe how bodies behave? Assuredly not…it is not true that for any
two bodies the force between them is given by the law of gravitation. Some bodies are
charged bodies, and the force between them is not Gmm’/r2. Rather it is some resultant of
this force…For bodies which are both massive and charged, the law of universal gravitation
and Coulomb’s law (the law that gives the force between two charges) interact to determine
the final force. But neither law by itself truly describes how the bodies behave. No charged
objects will behave just as the law of universal gravitation says. (1983, p. 57)

Cartwright changes her mind in her later philosophy about what this observation
implies for the nature of lawhood. But in her earlier work, Cartwright thinks a
distinction should be made between two kinds of scientific law: ‘fundamental laws’
which are false, general and explanatory, and ‘phenomenological laws’ which are
true, specific and non-explanatory (1983, pp. 100–127). She says she is ‘in favour
1.2 Enter Exceptions 7

of phenomenological laws’. These laws are messy, complex, and usually focus on
an application to just one type of phenomenon. Nonetheless, Cartwright thinks
these do state the facts and so there is no specific problem of exceptions for them.
Things are different for fundamental laws such as Newton’s laws of motion and
gravity, Maxwell’s laws or the Schrödinger equation. These are not true, although
they are easier to use than phenomenological laws and do explain the behaviour of a
greater variety of phenomena.
Cartwright proposes an alternative way of thinking about how fundamental laws
relate to the world, one which is also echoed in the work of Giere (1999). For
Cartwright, fundamental laws are not about the world: at least, not directly. Instead
they are about models which stand as ‘simulacra’ for real world physical systems
(1983, pp. 143–162). Some of the properties of the model will have counterparts in
the physical world, others will not. For example, when one assumes the solar
system contains point masses, one is making a fictional assumption that ought not
to be projected into the real world. Other assumptions such as ‘bodies exert an
inverse square force on one another’ are more realistic and counterparts of these can
be believed to exist in nature.
Giere’s views seem to differ from Cartwright’s only by the fact he is more
explicit about the nature of how models relate to the world and by the fact he makes
no distinction between phenomenological or fundamental laws: for Giere, all sci-
entific laws are about models. In fact calling them ‘laws’ at all is misleading, as
Giere believes the entire metaphor of a ‘law of nature’ is unsuitable for interpreting
science (1999, p. 30).
In Cartwright’s later philosophy (mostly to be found in her 1989 and 1999
books), although she does not abandon the role of models in scientific theorizing,
she does think she has a new role for laws: laws are not about behaviour in the
physical world but are about capacities. This view will be critically examined in
more detail in the next chapter.

1.2.3 Fodor and Schiffer on Special Science Laws

The debate about laws took a significant shift in emphasis in the early nineties with
the publication of articles by Fodor (1991) and Schiffer (1991). Although they
weren’t the first to introduce the expression ‘ceteris paribus’ into the debate (ac-
cording to Reutlinger et al. 2015 that credit belongs to Canfield and Lehrer 1961)
their decision to discuss the problem of exceptions in terms of ‘ceteris paribus
clauses’ drew the battle lines for much subsequent discussion on this issue.
According to Fodor, laws about the mind and human behaviour are important for a
number of theories in the so-called ‘special sciences’ such as economics, sociology,
psychology, etc. Here they function in much the same way as typical laws in the
physical sciences by providing predictions and explanations. The difference, claims
Fodor, is that these laws are always hedged with a ceteris paribus proviso:
8 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

If there are psychological laws, then they must be nonstrict; they must be “ceteris paribus”
or “all else equal” laws. There couldn’t, for example, be a mental state whose instantiation
in a creature literally, guarantees a subsequent behaviour, if only because the world might
come to an end before the creature has a chance to behave. And now the worry is that the
notion of a ceteris paribus law is, at best, in want of explication; or that, at worst, it’s an
oxymoron. (1991, p. 21)

To solve this problem Fodor considers introducing an entirely new class of

natural law. In the language of Schiffer (1991), there are now two kinds of laws of
nature: ‘strict laws’ (whose antecedent property guarantees the existence of the
consequent) and ‘non-strict laws’ (which do not). If ‘Fs are Gs’ is taken as a law of
nature, then ‘Fs are Gs’ is a strict law if, whenever F occurs, G occurs, and it is non-
strict, if it is possible for F to occur without G occurring. The controversial aspect
of Fodor’s proposal is his claim that the non-strict laws contain a ‘ceteris paribus’
clause or ‘all else being equal clause’ as part of the statement of the law itself.
Schiffer himself was hostile of any attempt to provide a semantics for such state-
ments, and concluded that, in the end, these kinds of statement in the special
sciences do not need to be construed as ‘laws of nature’ in order for them to be true
and useful (1991, pp. 10–15).
Mark Lange is equally blistering about the idea of laws containing a ceteris
paribus clause. However, whereas Fodor saw ceteris paribus clauses only in special
science laws, Lange argued they must exist in the laws of physics as well. He
introduced a problem for such laws which has come to be known as ‘Lange’s
dilemma’. The problem is semantic and concerns the kind of fact such a law would
be making about the world:
To state the law of thermal expansion, for instance, one would need to specify not only that
no one is hammering the bar inward at one end, but also that the bar is not encased on four
of its six sides in a rigid material that will not yield as the bar is heated, and so on. For that
matter, not all cases in which the bar is hammered upon constitute exceptions to
DL = k
L0
DT; the bar may be hammered upon so softly and be on such a frictionless
surface that the hammering produces translation rather than compression of the bar. One is
driven to say that the only way to utter a complete law-statement is to employ some such
condition as “… in the absence of relevant factors”. (1993, pp. 234–235)

It looks like in order to compose a statement of a non-strict law we would need

to either do one of two things: (i) state material conditions that exclude all the cases
not covered by the law, or (ii) include a general proviso that excludes all the cases
that conflict with the law. Neither option seems satisfactory. The first cannot be
achieved, argues Lange, because there is an infinitely large number of reasons and
circumstances why a law might fail. On the other hand, to use a ceteris paribus
clause (as Fodor suggests) renders the statement of the law vacuous: it is tanta-
mount Lange believes to saying ‘Fs are Gs except when they are not’. This ren-
dering of the law is true, but it is also logically necessarily true, and therefore not
something we would ordinarily call a ‘law of nature’.
Lange, just like Giere—and to some extent Cartwright as well—gets around the
problem by rejecting the received view. Instead, he thinks the aim of law statements
in science is not to describe some fact about the world but rather to function as a
1.2 Enter Exceptions 9

form of epistemic guarantee: that certain inferences are always epistemically war-
ranted under certain conditions (see Chap. 3).

1.2.4 Taking Exceptions Seriously: Braddon-Mitchell

and Schrenk

Lange’s dilemma introduced a semantic problem for laws with exceptions. Solving
or dissolving this problem became the dominant approach to exceptions in the
following years. Most of this discussion took place using Fodor’s idea of a ceteris
paribus clause to scientific laws. The journal Erkenntnis issued a special edition in
2002 outlining some of the latest research on this topic. All the articles selected for
that special edition focused on the semantic question, i.e. what kind of fact do
scientific laws that are hedged with a ceteris paribus clause make about the world?
It was felt that this question must take precedence, since only once truth-makers for
the statement are given could we then answer any epistemological questions about
how the law is confirmed as well as any metaphysical questions about whether or
not there are any genuine non-strict laws in nature.
Despite this emphasis, there have been some philosophers willing to discuss the
metaphysical question whilst side-stepping Lange’s dilemma. Two recent
philosophers who have taken this approach include Braddon-Mitchell (2001) and
Schrenk (2007 and 2014). Both these philosophers, whilst accepting that some
genuine laws of nature have exceptions, deny that scientific laws which assert them
come with a ceteris paribus clause.
For Braddon-Mitchell the statement of a real law of nature that has exceptions is
no different in form to any other kind of law. For example, if the form of an
exceptionless law is ‘Fs are Gs’ then the form of an exception-ridden law is also ‘Fs
are Gs’. Some statements of law on this view are therefore allowed to be false. He
develops a version of Lewis’ (1973, 1983, 1986, 1994) ‘best system account’ of
laws which claims that the laws of nature are the axioms in a deductive system of all
empirical truths attaining the best balance of strength and simplicity. As a meta-
physical theory of laws, this is an example of a ‘non-governing’ view since what the
laws of nature are depends on more basic facts about occurrent physical behavior.
By analogy with data compression in computer science, Braddon-Mitchell makes a
convincing case for thinking that some fidelity in the laws can be sacrificed if the
tradeoff in strength and simplicity is worth it (2001).
I think there is much going for Braddon-Mitchell’s account. In fact it is the
inspiration behind the approach to ideal laws that I will present here. Nonetheless, I
do not think the current proposal by Braddon-Mitchell can be accepted wholesale.
My main worries are with the result that some laws are false and with the analogy to
lossy compression—which I do not think can be fully implemented whilst com-
mitted to the framework of the best system account. These points will be further
developed and defended in Chap. 4.
10 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

Schrenk understands something very different to ‘exceptions’ by comparison to

the philosophers we’ve looked at so far. In his 2007 book The Metaphysics of
Ceteris Paribus Laws he claims that he is not concerned with what he calls ‘ap-
parent exceptions’ that are caused by the practices of idealization and approxima-
tion in science:
A law might have an apparent exception (or falsification) because its consequent property
is, while fully instantiated, counteracted or diluted by other events. Think of a multitude of
forces (gravitational forces, electromagnetic forces, etc.) all acting upon a single body, an
electron, for example. The law of gravitation alone will seem to have an exception if the
other forces are disregarded in a prediction of the electron’s trajectory. Quite a different case
would be the following: God decides to switch off, for a second or two, the gravitational
force attracting the electron. This, as opposed to the first case, would be an example where
we could justifiably claim that there is a real exception to the law (2007, p. 25).

Del Monte’s critique of the pendulum law, Cartwright’s critique of Newton’s

law of gravitation, and Fodor’s discussion of special science laws, would not
constitute cases of ‘real exceptions’ according to Schrenk. His idea of a real
exception comes closer to the traditional concept of a miracle, where a law is
literally ‘broken’ for a moment or two. He calls these laws ‘index-laws’ and they
are not to be confused with laws that feature idealizations or approximations:
Suppose we have a candidate for a fundamental law, ‘Fs are Gs’, but at a certain space-time
point this candidate has an exception. Suppose furthermore that this space-time point
cannot be distinguished in kind from other places and times where the law candidate holds.
This is to say, it is impossible to single out the exceptional case by means of a general
description of the circumstances in which it occurs…Define an index-regularity in the
following way: (x, y, z, t) as an individual exceptional space-time region (an index) for the
regularity R iff R has an exception at (x, y, z, t) and there is at least one other space-time
region (x’, y’, z’, t’) which is exactly alike in circumstances—that is, alike in intrinsic,
non-relational properties—but where the regularity does not have an exception. An index-
regularity is a regularity R which has an index. (2007, p. 45)

Schrenk does not give many specific examples from scientific theory of pur-
ported index-laws. He identifies space-time regions in the center of black holes
(singularities) as places that might generate the need for an index-law. It is widely
held that the laws of physics ‘break-down’ in such singularities so this seems like a
suitable place where they might reside, according to Schrenk.
In this investigation I will be interested in laws with exceptions as they are most
commonly understood by philosophers writing on this issue and not with what
Schrenk calls ‘index-laws’. The reason for this is that these are the ones that can be
found throughout scientific practice. Given that some have argued exceptions
require us to re-think how science is practiced, and what its main claims are about
the world, I believe this is the very best way of addressing this concern and
answering the question of whether or not the concept of a law of nature is still
relevant. Schrenk has recently (2014) updated his views which, like
Braddon-Mitchell, he fits into a version of the best system account. This too will be
investigated and critically discussed later in Chap. 3.
1.3 Skeptical Solutions 11

1.3 Skeptical Solutions

The appearance of some exceptions to scientific laws suggests we should take

seriously the possibility that some laws of nature are themselves non-universal.
That would be a significant shift from the received view which places part of
science’s success down to its discovery and application of universal laws. It is no
surprise then, that some philosophers have resisted this conclusion. Let us call any
approach to the problem of exceptions that denies there are non-universal laws of
nature a ‘skeptical solution’ as they are skeptical about the existence of real
exceptions to laws. Here I will briefly discuss three different skeptical solutions that
have been given. Since the aim of this book is to show how a metaphysically robust
theory of non-universal laws is possible, space will not be given over to an
exhaustive refutation of each of these positions. Instead I will indicate some of the
problems facing these proposals by way of motivating the search for a theory of
non-universal laws.

1.3.1 Hedging

One line of response is that scientific laws which appear to have an exception are
really a kind of ‘shorthand’ for an exceptionless law. Earman et al. (2002) claim this
is true for many of the alleged examples that come from physics. The way these
laws are written suggests that they have exceptions, but this is only true if we forget
to include in a proper statement of the law the additional conditions that need to be
met. Recall above that Lange argued this strategy does not work for many laws
because such a list of conditions would be infinite and a full statement of them
unattainable. Yet Earman, Roberts and Smith disagree:
This list is indefinite only if expressed in a language that purposely avoids terminology
from physics. If one helps oneself to technical terms from physics, the condition is easily
stated: The “law” of thermal expansion is rigorously true if there are no external boundary
stresses on the bar throughout the process. Other putative examples of indefinite conditions
can likewise be easily stated within the language of physics. For instance, Kepler’s “law”
that planets travel in ellipses is only rigorously true if there is no force on the orbiting body
other than the force of gravity from the dominant body and vice versa. (2002, p. 284)

The general idea would be that whenever we have a statement of a possible law
‘Fs are Gs’ we must also include in the full statement all the additional physical
conditions that need to be present: H1, H2, H3, etc., so that a proper statement of the
law should read as follows:

ðxÞððFx & H1 x & H2 x & . . . & Hn xÞ  GxÞ

If we include these in the antecedent of the law statement, then it will be rigorously
true and exceptionless, and so the problem of exceptions is avoided. How
12 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

successful is this as a general strategy for solving the problem of exceptions? There
are four reasons why I believe this does not provide a satisfactory answer.
1. Although Lange’s charge that a list of saving conditions is impossible might not
apply to some laws, there are still many other laws for which the point remains
convincing. If we go back to Fodor’s examples from the special sciences, a law
such as ‘If a person desires X, they will take steps to acquire it’, cannot be a
given a full set of conditions that tell us when and only when the law applies.
Now, this might be for one of two reasons. Either such conditions exist, but we
just don’t know them (perhaps because of the current state of our knowledge in
these fields), or the conditions don’t exist and so it is not possible to state the law
in any finite way. Whatever the explanation for our inability to hedge these
types of laws, the fact we are currently unable to do so rules against using
hedging as a general strategy to the problem of exceptions.
2. Even for the laws that might be hedged in this way, it is questionable whether
we would feel comfortable calling the resulting statement a ‘law of nature’. As
Peter Lipton points out, our intuitions are more likely to side with regarding
heavily hedged generalizations as ‘accidents’ rather than ‘laws’ (1999, p. 160).
It is not clear what the reason is for this, but one suggestion is that we have an
instinctive belief that, whatever the laws are, they must be simple. Or put
another way, the laws of nature must be such that they can be captured using
simple or very concise statements. Whether there is any deep metaphysical
connection between simplicity and nomicity (lawhood) would need to be proved,
otherwise it could just be a prejudice on our part. There is at least one current
theory (the best system account) which places simplicity at the heart of what
makes for laws and there is clearly a preference among working scientists for
simple over complex explanations of nature. In Chap. 4 I provide further reasons
for thinking lawhood is intimately bound up with simplicity which will add
further weight to the argument that hedging is not a viable solution to the
problem.
3. Hedged laws are the same as Cartwright’s ‘phenomenological laws’; they get
things right but at a cost in applicability. By hedging these laws in the way
Earman et al. suggest, we are restricting the domain of objects which they apply
to. If we consider the example Earman et al., provide of thermal expansion, this
law holds only when there are ‘no external boundary stresses’ on the bar. But
how many bars of metal actually exist which satisfy such conditions? The
received view has it that one of the main purposes of laws is to explain the
natural world; but hedged laws will explain very little, if most examples fail to
fall within the cover of the law. Laws should be general and cover a wide variety
of objects. Hedging them restricts their range and so is not a desirable solution.
4. Lastly, using hedging as a solution to exceptions raises difficult questions about
how laws in physics are confirmed by empirical evidence. Some physical laws
come with conditions that cannot be realistically met in the physical world. The
law of the pendulum, for instance, demands the presence of ‘point masses’ and
‘frictionless pivot points’. These types of phenomena do not exist in nature and,
1.3 Skeptical Solutions 13

whilst they might be approximated, cannot be simulated under laboratory

conditions. What is the relationship between the evidence and these impossibly
hedged statements? Those in favor of hedging would need to provide an answer
to this. Until a plausible account is given, we should look for an alternative
solution.

1.3.2 Concretization

Hedging attempts to solve the problem of exceptions by making the statement of

the law exceptionless. An alternative solution known as ‘concretization’ also tries to
make the statement of the law exceptionless; but whereas hedging tries to achieve
this using provisos, advocates of concretization claim the law can be ‘corrected’ in
order to take into account the effects of the interfering factors. On this interpreta-
tion, most scientific laws are only limiting cases of the real laws of nature. Many
scientific laws are functional laws: they describe mathematical relationships that
hold between the values of quantitative physical properties. Examples of quanti-
tative properties include mass, velocity, weight, wavelength, etc. The activity of
completing equations in order to accommodate the numerical impact of other
factors is a routine practice in applied science. For example, let us consider the law
of the pendulum. Written as a mathematical equation it claims the following:
sffiffiffi
l
T ¼ 2p
g

Here T represents the time period of one complete oscillation, l the length of the
pendulum from its center of mass to the pivot, and g the value of the force due to
gravity. When T and l are accurately known a simple pendulum can be used to
measure the gravitational pull of the earth. This experiment was carried out by the
physicists Robert Nelson and M. G. Olsson (1986). They knew that measuring the
values for T and l of a typical pendulum would not return an accurate value for g. This
is because of the now familiar reasons that all constructed pendulums fail to have a
massless rod, frictionless pivot point, circular motion, etc. Nelson and Olsson’s
solution was not to attempt to make such an ideal pendulum but to factor in the effect
of the differences between the ideal and real pendulum in calculating for g. For
instance, when accommodating the fact the rod and pendulum have mass, they used
the following equation:
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
I
T ¼ 2p
mgL
14 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

And likewise, in order to accommodate the fact the motion of the pendulum is an
ellipsis and not a perfect circle, they had to factor in the following series into the
simple law of the pendulum:
sffiffiffi 
l 1 2 11 4 173 6 22931 1319183
T ¼ 2p 1þ h0 þ h0 þ h0 þ h80 þ h10 þ . . .
g 16 3072 737280 1321205760 951268147200 0

Nowak (1980) and Laymon (1985, 1989) have attempted a solution to exceptions
by claiming that the real statement of the law should factor in the impact of all the
additional elements that have some effect on the value of the variables in the law.
Nowak calls this process ‘concretization’ and claims it is one of the most distinctive
features of the scientific method. He provides a useful formalism for thinking about
this process. Let ‘Tk’ represent a statement of ideal law that has been hedged:
 
Tk If Gð xÞ and p1 ð xÞ ¼ 0 and . . . and pk1 ð xÞ ¼ 0 and pk ðxÞ ¼ 0; then FðxÞ
¼ fk ðH1 ðxÞ; . . . ; Hn ðxÞÞ:

(Nowak 1980, p. 29)

In the formula, G(x) stands for whatever type of physical system the law is intended
to apply to. So if our scientific law is the simple law of the pendulum then G(x)
reads ‘x is a pendulum’. The phrase ‘p1 ð xÞ ¼ 0 and . . . and pk1 ð xÞ ¼
0 and pk ðxÞ ¼ 0’ is Nowak’s way of writing the hedging provisos so that p1 stands
for a particular physical property that must take a certain value for the law to hold
true. In the case of the law of the pendulum, p1 ð xÞ ¼ 0 might stand for ‘there is no
air-friction’, for example. The formula FðxÞ ¼ fk ðH1 ðxÞ; . . . ; Hn ðxÞ represents the
original scientific law that has exceptions, showing how the value for one property
(F) is functionally dependent (fk) on the values of the other properties.
We can now imagine how a statement of the scientific law would look if only
one step in the concretization process had been achieved—that is, if just one of the
provisos had been removed and replaced with a correcting function:
 
T k1 If Gð xÞ and p1 ð xÞ ¼ 0 and . . . and pk1 ð xÞ ¼ 0 and pk ð xÞ 6¼ 0; then F ð xÞ
¼ fk1 ðH1 ð xÞ; . . . ; Hn ð xÞ; pk ð xÞÞ ¼ g½fk ðH1 ð xÞ; . . .; Hn ð xÞÞ; hðpk ð xÞÞ:

(Nowak 1980, p. 29)

Here F ð xÞ ¼ fk1 ðH1 ð xÞ; . . . ; Hn ð xÞ; pk ð xÞÞ ¼ g½fk ðH1 ð xÞ; . . .; Hn ð xÞÞ; hðpk ð xÞÞ
stands for the modified version of the law. One would expect that the values we get
for the original variables F and H1 to Hn are now more accurately represented by
the law. We can theorize about what the scientific law would look like when all of
the conditions have been removed and replaced by correcting functions. The fully
‘concretized’ version of the scientific law can be represented by the following:
1.3 Skeptical Solutions 15

 
T0 If Gð xÞ and p1 ð xÞ 6¼ 0 and . . . and pk1 ð xÞ 6¼ 0 and pk ð xÞ 6¼ 0; then F ð xÞ
¼ f0 ðH1 ð xÞ; . . . ; Hn ð xÞ; pk ð xÞÞ
¼ ½nf1 ðH1 ð xÞ; . . .; Hn ð xÞ; pk ð xÞ; . . .; p2 ð xÞ; mðp1 ð xÞÞ:

(Nowak 1980, p. 30)

Can the process of concretization as outlined by Nowak be used as a general
strategy for solving the problem of exceptions? Just like the case of hedging, this
proposal also suffers a number of weaknesses that I believe make it too unattractive
as a general strategy.
1. The first problem is that a full concretization is rarely, if at all, carried out by
practicing scientists. Nowak himself admits as much claiming that ‘scientists
end their procedure of concretization at some point’ (1980, p. 30). The reason
for this is that the resulting ‘concretized’ statement of the law is incredibly long
and complex, including variables for a large number of parameters. Whilst
improving one’s formula by adding some correcting functions is part-and-parcel
of scientific practice, it is never the goal to construct a fully concretized equa-
tion. The aim of doing this, it seems, is only to have more accuracy in the
application of the law; it is not to discover the exceptionless ‘law of nature’
which is somehow hidden behind the simple scientific law. Claiming that sci-
entists should search for and formulate fully concretized laws takes us out of
step with science as it is actually practiced, which seems to have little desire to
formulate such absolutely accurate laws.
2. Another problem is that concretization works reasonably well for functional
laws that can be given a precise mathematical formula, but it is much harder to
see how this can be used for laws described in a qualitative language. How
about the statement ‘smoking causes cancer’? We know that on some occasions
smoking does not cause cancer, so this looks like a good example of a
non-universal law (if indeed it is a law at all). Whilst scientists know some of the
factors that might link smoking to developing cancer, the property of ‘having
cancer’ cannot be given a numerical value, and the functional dependency
between it and influencing factors cannot be described mathematically. This
solution at best will therefore only work for some scientific laws with excep-
tions, and cannot be used as a universal strategy for solving the problem.
3. A final problem for concretization echoes that of the problem against hedging:
concretized laws, as true and exceptionless as they are, seem intuitively more
like accidents than laws. Put more colloquially, they just don’t have the ‘feel of
laws’. Again, what that ‘feel’ comes down to needs to be explored in order for
this point to have any critical bite. My contention will be that the reason why we
instinctively dislike calling fully concretized formulae ‘laws’ is their complex-
ity. Whilst they are general and universally applicable (unlike hedged laws) they
are still extremely complex in character.
16 1 Laws of Nature and the Problem of Exceptions

1.3.3 Selectivism

An alternative approach to exceptions is to be selective about which laws of science

should be considered genuine laws of nature. Even the most ardent advocate of the
received view will believe that not all current scientific laws capture real laws of
nature: science is still progressing and, if history is anything to go by, some of these
laws will turn out to be wrong. The selectivist response is to argue that the
appearance of exceptions to a scientific law is good evidence that it fails to capture a
genuine law of nature. According to selectivists, only some scientific laws should
be regarded as ‘proper laws’ and the ones with exceptions are non-nomic but useful
generalizations of some kind of physical behavior.
This position has been adopted by Swartz (1985, 1995). He makes a distinction
between what he calls ‘real laws’ and ‘near laws’. Laws that contain exceptions,
idealizations or provisos should not be regarded as real laws of nature. Responding
to Scriven’s claim that most scientific laws are false if taken literally he writes the
following:
I still find his arguments persuasive, but with one important rider: By ‘laws of nature’, he
does not refer to what I am here calling ‘physical laws’; that is, the difference between us is
not just terminological. Scriven’s point is about the pronouncements of science, about what
scientists call ‘laws’; what they invoke in their explanations of physical phenomena; what
they advance in their textbooks and teach to their students. In this essay, when I refer to
‘laws’ I am talking about a certain class of truths about this world, wholly independent of
whether or not anyone successfully discovers, formulates, announces, believes, or promotes
those truths. If Boyle’s (so-called) law is—as it certainly is—false, so be it. When I
hereinafter talk about laws, I do not mean Boyle’s law. (1985, p. 4)

This response takes a categorical line towards exceptions: they just do not exist
in real laws of nature and regardless of whatever scientists think about their laws, if
they have exceptions, then they are not really truly, laws of nature. Whilst draco-
nian, this approach has the benefit of providing a clear response to the problem. The
worry I have is given the pervasive nature of the problem of exceptions—running
right through both physical and special scientific laws—will there be anything left
in scientific theory worthy of the title ‘law of nature’? If one is to take this stance,
then the onus falls on those in favor of universality to come up with examples of
exactly what they have in mind.
Swartz himself admits that few examples of real physical laws can be found in
scientific practice. The one example he does give, ‘the constancy of the speed of
light’ (1995, p. 70), surely fails to pass his own criteria. Firstly, only problemati-
cally is this thought to be a law of nature. The speed of light is more often classified
as a universal constant, that may appear in formulations of laws, but isn’t itself a
law. But even if this is put to one side, this ‘law’ has exceptions as the speed of light
is known to only be constant in a perfect vacuum which does not exist anywhere in
nature due to microwave background radiation. Therefore, even by his own criteria
his example fails to be a law. We can be skeptical then of whether science will ever
Another random document with
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cunning to avoid being discovered and yet left the problem still
unsolved in his tortured brain.
Presently the little procession arrived at an open piece of ground in
the midst of the forest, like a fairy glade, surrounded as it was by the
stately trunks of the cocoa-palms standing majestically like the
columns of a Greek circular temple. In the centre of this open space
grew a gigantic tree, like a king circled by his courtiers.
Up to this monarch of the grove Tari led his captive, and halted.
Jim, as he slipped behind a clump of brushwood, recognised the
spot as one which he and Tari had stumbled upon during their
exploration of the afternoon, and he remembered that it was on the
opposite side of the island to the signal palm, the lagoon coming in
between.
The conspirators had chosen their spot well. It was far out of earshot
of the camp, and seemed as if designed purposely for the object
which they had in view.
Silently they went about their preparations, whilst the boy watched
them from his hiding-place with a horror in his eyes.
Making use of a grummet, Tari, with the coil of rope round his
shoulders, went up the tree like a cat. To any one who has never
seen a native go up a tree in this fashion it is a most astonishing
sight.
The rope circles the tree and the man's thighs, whilst he keeps his
balance with his feet pressed against the trunk, progressing upwards
by jerks. Each time, as he takes the pressure of his body off the
rope, he slips the grummet higher up the trunk, tautening it up with
his thighs before it can drop back again.
In this way Tari was soon at the top, and producing the boat's
halliard-block and a salvagee strop from inside his shirt, he fixed
them on the strongest branch he could find; then, reeving the rope,
lowered one end to the ground. This Bill Benson and Broncho took
hold of, and the Kanaka taking the other, they lowered him easily to
the ground, thus testing at the same time the efficiency of their
gibbet.
The doomed man was now led under the dangling loop, one of the
executioners still keeping a firm hold on the rope to his wrists, whilst
the others removed the gag.
Immediately the miserable wretch, dropping on his knees, burst into
a piteous appeal for mercy.
The bosun's mate turned away, unable to stand the dreadful sight,
but Broncho was made of sterner stuff, and listened to the raving,
distracted words with an unshaken sternness.
"Have mercy!" whimpered the terrified ruffian. "Have mercy! I'll be
your slave. Anything! I'll give you gold [eagerly], for I have it where I
can lay hands on it. I swear it. By God, I swear it; only let me go!"
Slowly Broncho shook his head.
"Christ! Have you no pity in your soul? Think what you are doing!
This is murder—cruel, bloody murder!"
"It's a shore-enuff proper-conducted lynchin'," growled the cowboy.
"What have I done to you? Lord God! What have I done? Free my
hands and I'll fight you square, anyhow you like! Anything but this,
this—this horrible death. I ain't fit to die. Lemme free an' have a
chance in a square fight."
"I don't fight wi' skunks o' your breed!" came the scornful answer.
At this the wretch broke down utterly and exhausted himself in wild
oaths of abuse; but after a string or two of these Broncho cut in
impatiently:
"I allow you'd better throw off any prayer-stock you-alls wishes to cut
loose. Your time's gettin' some scarce."
With a moan of terror the doomed ruffian threw himself down on his
face, howling like a cur, and casting to the winds all further efforts at
self-control.
Unmoved by this pitiful display of a cowardly soul, Broncho stepped
up to the writhing form and pulled him to his feet; then, with a slow,
deliberate care, adjusted the noose round the condemned man's
neck, and called to the others to haul in the slack of the rope.
All this time, Jim, crouching behind the brushwood and shaking all
over with fright, puzzled his poor head in a desperation as to how to
act.
At the last moment the thought came to him. Already the three men
were preparing to lay back on the rope, when right over their heads
came a weird, unearthly voice:
"Hangmen, beware! Do this deed and your time will shortly come!
Beware! beware!"
The effect was instantaneous. Tari and the bosun's mate dropped
the rope and sprang backwards in wild alarm; only the undaunted
cowboy stood firm.
Even the condemned man ceased his whimpering and looked up
fearfully.
"Blazes! What were that?" cried the scared bluejacket in a hoarse
whisper.
"Don' know," replied Broncho laconically. "A sperit mebbe, but no
sperit palaver is goin' to jolt up this lynchin'. Take a holt and h'ist
away."
"Take care! take care!" hissed the sepulchral tones again.
"My God!" groaned the prisoner, and would have collapsed, but a tug
at the rope about his neck by Broncho's steady hand caused him to
remain erect.
As for the superstitious bosun's mate, he crouched down as if
fearing a blow, whilst Tari, with a wild cry of "Spirit debble! spirit
debble!" fled madly from the spot.
Meanwhile, the small author of this terror-inspiring voice was tearing
back along the trail with all the speed he could muster.
Breathlessly he burst into the camp, and darting to Jack's side,
gasped incoherently,
"They're lynchin' him! They're lynchin' him!"
"Him? Whom? Why, it's Jim," exclaimed the rolling-stone, sitting up
and blinking his eyes, his example being followed by the surprised
Loyola.
"Come!" urged the panting boy. "Come quick! We may be in time. I
give 'em a good scare. Follow me!" and off he went.
Jack was up in an instant, rapidly putting two and two together from
the boy's wild words, and away he dashed in pursuit, with Loyola on
his heels.
As they ran Jim managed to gasp out between his sobbing breaths a
short account of Broncho's lynching, which drew an exclamation of
concerned astonishment from the rover.
All this time Broncho was using his best eloquence to get the
bluejacket to return to his grisly job.
"Brace up!" he urged, "brace up! You-alls ain't goin' to stampede the
trail at a bunch o' ghost talk."
"I can't, man! Blawst me, I can't do it," groaned the terrified Bill
Benson. "Gaud save us," he went on; "it were a warnin'!"
"Chucks!" growled the impatient and lion-hearted cowboy. "Rats to
'em, I say! Air you a quitter, Bill Benson? You, a British navy-man, a
quitter?" and there was scorn keen as a razor-edge in his drawling
voice.
"S'elp me Gaud, Broncho, I can't face it!"
"You heard 'em, Benson," put in Hawksley, seeing his chance; "you
heard 'em. Don't let that fiend hang me, or may my spirit haunt you!
May my blood be on your head and put a curse on all your days!"
"Silence, you gal-thief, silence!" hissed the angry cowpuncher, giving
a jerk to the rope which nearly dislocated the wretched man's neck;
then, addressing himself to the bluejacket, he went on:
"If you-alls baulk this ford, Benson, I'll put the coward's brand on you,
shore as I'm tabbed in the stud-book Buckin' Broncho."
"It's no use," returned the man-of-war's man sulkily. "I ain't out to
buck agin spirits—my courage don' run that swift. I ain't afraid as
long as it's men, but ghosts top the limit o' my gristle. They
overweights my firin'-battery absolute and entire."
For a second the cowpuncher glared in silence; then, slowly drawing
his revolver, cocked it and covered the bluejacket with its sinister
barrel.
"Mebbe this here argument'll revive you some," he drawled
contemptuously.
Broncho was bluffing, bluffing desperately, but he had not spent the
pay of so many seasons learning poker for nothing.
"Better catch a holt!" he went on significantly. "This here gun ain't out
for play. It's a business proposeetion which it ain't wise nor healthy to
monkey with."
After one wild, searching look into the stern eyes of the cowboy, Bill
Benson gave in and reluctantly resumed his hold on the rope; whilst
the unhappy Hawksley, seeing his last hope gone, burst afresh into a
flow of terror-inspired lamentations and prayers.
At last the moment had come!
"Lay back on it!" hissed the cowpuncher, as the two executioners
drew the rope taut.
In another second Hawksley would have been dangling in space.
Already he was on the tips of his toes, when "Crack!" and the rope
was cut through just above his head, and down he fell in a heap.
"Hold! What the devil are you doing?" cried a panting voice, and the
next moment Jack burst into the open, a smoking pistol in his hand,
followed by Jim and Loyola.
"You ain't wanted here, Jack Derringer," roared the baffled
cowpuncher. "He's my steer, an' rope him I will! I'll take it kind if you'll
quit blockin' up the scenery an' obstructin' this here execution."
"Why, Broncho, what's taken you? My old bunkie isn't going to turn
into a butchering desperado, is he? Come, old son, this little game of
yours has gone far enough."
"I stands a corralful from you, Jack, as you-alls knows; but you're
playin' mighty near the limit. I asks you again to vamoose," returned
the cowboy, sticking desperately to his guns; then he added more
softly, "It's for your own good, pard."
"No good's going to come to me by any man's murder in cold blood."
"It's a fair an' square lynchin', Jack, and a sight easier death than the
skunk desarves."
"Chuck it, Broncho, chuck it!" cried the rover. "It's no use. I can't
allow it. The thing's impossible."
"On'y a jerk er two an' the gal's yours, Jack. It ain't your shout. I
takes the responsibeelity. You-alls has no need to take a hand. He's
my beef. Lope up the trail a hoss-length or two, Jack, an' the gal's
free." Thus the cowboy tempted cunningly.
The blood rushed to the rover's face at the very thought. For a
second a mighty temptation to let events take their course assailed
him, and then, with a sinking misery in his heart, he regained his
manhood.
"No, Broncho, no!" he jerked hoarsely.
"Think o' the hell you-alls is condemnin' the poor gal to! Think of her
draggin' along her life-trail on the rope o' that hoss-thief," went on the
tempter. "I allows you ain't the right to sp'ile her life this way."
The others watched the pair, waiting on the result with beating
hearts. Would the cowboy's eloquence prevail? Would he after all be
allowed to carry out his dreadful project? A word from Jack and the
execution would continue. Every one realised the deadly temptation
the cunning Broncho was so insidiously putting before his friend.
Would the rover give in? Had he the right to spoil another life as well
as his own? No one dared to answer the question.
Suddenly Loyola threw her head back, and going to the hideously
tempted man, put her hand mutely into his, with a tender look of
perfect confidence.
Jack caught the look, and knew that she was telling him that she
would abide by his decision, whichever way it went. She trusted him,
trusted him absolutely—that was what her eyes said—to do that
which was right.
"What do you say?" asked Broncho, with an air of finality. "Shall I
turn him loose an' bog the gal's happiness in an everlastin'
quicksand, so as when the years o' hell an' misery pile up she comes
to hate you an' your high-falutin' moralities worse'n him?"
"My God, Lolie, you won't? Oh, say you won't!" groaned poor Jack.
"Never!" whispered the girl, a smile of the supremest courage upon
her face.
"Turn him loose," ordered the rover, in a voice which they could
hardly recognise as his; then, rounding on his heel, he walked slowly
out of the glade with bent head and miserable eyes.
A deep breath, almost a groan, burst from the lips of the onlookers.
Jim sobbed audibly. The strain had been too much for the poor boy,
now that he realised so fully all that his action had cost the man
whom he loved most in the world. Bitterly he cursed himself. He
would rather have seen Hawksley hanged a thousand times. Utterly
miserable and sick at heart, he flung himself upon his face on the
ground, his whole body shaking with the strength of his emotion.
And Loyola—what of Loyola? With a strange, glorious light shining in
her splendid eyes, she watched the receding figure of the rolling-
stone; there was no misery in her face, only a perfect sweetness of
content. Heedless of its consequences to herself, she only thought of
her lover's courage, and her spirit leaped within her in a great
exultation.
To her came the cowboy, asking sadly,
"I hope you ain't none raged with me, ma'am? I were playin' the hand
for you and Jack."
For answer she placed her hand in his and murmured softly:
"I understand, Broncho—and I shan't forget," with which the
cowboy's troubled face cleared wonderfully.
"An' my pard, Jack, ma'm'; I knowed all the time he were right. Any
other maverick would ha' weakened, but he didn't. He's all grit, is
Jack. I played up the hand for all it was worth, but I knew I was
beaten when he fust called me."
At this praise of the man she loved the woman fairly beamed upon
him; then her eyes turned slowly upon the unconscious form of her
husband.
Following her glance, Broncho growled gruffly:
"Luck's hopped your way to-night, mister. I allow a thunderbolt's bein'
constructed to put out your light, an' that's why Providence puts the
hobbles on us humans an' blocks our game. I surmise they ain't
none ready for you yet. Mebbe their heatin' plant ain't planned so as
it reaches high enuff figures for you-alls, an' them pitchfork gents is
busy fixin' it."
With which characteristic address he stepped to the side of its
unconscious object, followed by Loyola.
The all-but-hanged scoundrel lay there strangely white and still, his
legs crumpled up under him.
One glance of his experienced eyes, and the cowboy gave a queer
exclamation of surprise.
"What is it?" cried the woman anxiously.
But, instead of answering, Broncho hurriedly felt under the man's
shirt for the beat of his heart.
For nearly a minute he held his hand there, whilst Loyola and Bill
Benson watched him with a growing look of apprehension; then he
slowly drew back the eyelids and revealed a pair of glassy,
expressionless eyes.
With a recoil of horror Loyola staggered back and fainted, the
bluejacket catching her as she fell.
Hawksley was dead!
"Heart failure, I reckon!" muttered the cowpuncher grimly. "Seems
his tickets for the great unknown were taken after all!"
And he turned to the unconscious woman, whilst the bosun's mate
rushed to the lagoon for water.

FOOTNOTES:
[12] Tin hats = drunk.
[13] This is the name given by sailors to the small windmill
noticeable on all Norwegian wooden ships, which is used to pump
the water out of them.
 CHAPTER X
"THE BLACK ADDER"
Jack, sitting hunched up with his face between his hands in a
posture of utter despair, looked up dully as he heard the sound of
approaching feet; then, as the gloomy procession came out on to the
sands, he started to his feet with a cry.
First came Loyola, walking slowly with bent head and one hand on
Jim's shoulder; but it was the sight of what was behind her drew the
cry from his lips, for on the shoulders of Broncho and the man-of-
war's man lay the body of a man.
The rover rushed forward.
"Hawksley's cashed in!" came in a solemn voice from Broncho, as he
reached his side; but there was little need of the words. The fact was
evident enough.
"You hanged him after all?" burst out Jack, with a queer strangle of
reproach in his voice.
"No, pard; it ain't our funeral. The angels finished our job," explained
the cowboy quietly.
The body was covered with the boat-sail and laid under the big palm;
then the castaways flung themselves down to sleep, worn out by the
tragic events of the night.
Nobody awoke until long after sun-up, and as Broncho was serving
out their scanty rations, Tari appeared out of the scrub and slunk into
a corner with downcast eyes.
Jack awoke to find himself blind again, but as he felt the woman's
hand in his, he knew that she was at last free, and, notwithstanding
his blindness, a great comfort flooded his soul.
At breakfast Jim explained his share in the tragic lynching to the
astonished bosun's mate and Broncho, and the mystery of the
supernatural voice was cleared up.
At midday the body of Hawksley was buried at the foot of the big
palm in silence.
After the exciting events of the first twenty-four hours, life on the atoll
progressed smoothly enough.
At first the shock of the tragedy seemed to stun Loyola's
overstrained senses, but gradually, as the lazy, uneventful days
passed, the memory of all the late horrors wore off, and a great hope
of future happiness in Jack's arms filled her heart.
She began to pick up spirits and show more of that sunny
disposition, with its infectious gaiety, which had been such a feature
of her character before her unfortunate marriage.
At times a snatch of song would burst from her lips, which caused a
smile of satisfaction to flit over the faces of the castaways, and she
owned a devoted slave in each one of them.
"My, boys! but she's good gear!" commented Bill enthusiastically,
one lazy afternoon, indicating Loyola with his pipe as he reclined
under the cocoa-palms.
She and Jack, deep in talk, were pacing up and down the beach,
hand in hand, for such was their custom on account of the latter's
blindness.
She was telling him all the Island news, of new schooners, new
stations, and new captains: of how old So-and-so had taken a new
native wife, and Jack Bounce had been called down and thrashed by
a new chum; of the stranding of the Wee Willie whilst Cap'n Ben was
locked in his cabin killing imaginary snakes, and how the new trader
on Pleasant Island had got a forty-four Colt bullet through the back
from Nigger Bill, as a gentle hint to clear out; that Billy Cæsar, a
noted chief in the Hebrides, had been wearing out his teeth on tough
missionary again; how the blackbirder May Allen had lost a boat and
her new recruiter in the Louisiade Archipelago, and numerous other
small bits of South Sea gossip.
"She's shore a peach!" assented Broncho to the bluejacket's remark.
"Don't she smile be-e-autiful?" chimed in Jim, with an awestruck
voice of admiration. "Lor, but she's a fine lady!"
"You can see that stickin' out a foot," agreed Bill Benson. "She'll 'ave
a gunny-sack o' dibs too, bein' 'Awksley's widder. 'Eavens! but she is
'traps,'" and he turned up his eyes expressively.
"I don't surmise Jack'll let her handle any o' that Hawksley varmint's
crooked-gained wad," declared Broncho. "He's powerful proud, is
Jack."
"An' what about them maroonin' jokers on the Black Adder?" queried
the bosun's mate reflectively.
"Does you-alls allow they're liable to come heavin' up on the
scenery?" inquired the cowpuncher.
"Very pre-obbable," said the bluejacket. "They may 'ave the curiosity
to see 'ow we're makin' out. If that Dago Charlie—him that were
'Awksley's mate an' did the maroonin' act—if 'e, I sez, comes
protrudin' that snaky schooner our way, there'll be trouble, sure; but I
won't panic much if 'e do come mine-droppin' under our bows. I just
itches to draw a bead on 'im with one o' these Winchesters.
Howsomedever, I fancies he's too busy lootin' copra stations an'
fishin' other jossers' pearls."
"Let's bathe," proposed the boy suddenly; and rising languidly to
their feet, they strolled off to the lagoon.
Here they were wont to disport themselves in the water four or five
times a day, and to Jack especially this was a great pleasure, for he
found that his blindness was no great inconvenience in the water.
As the lagoon of this atoll was completely surrounded by the growth,
resulting from the toil of the coral insect, it was safe to bathe in it,
without fear of the dreaded sharks which swarmed round the outer
reef.
It made an ideal bathing-place. The white beach shelved gradually,
and such was the transparency of the water that the bottom, with its
clumps of coral, its glittering pearl-oyster beds, and its brilliantly hued
fish, could be seen with ease.
Jim, the first few days on the island, fished with his usual ardour, and
caught a number of queer-shaped marine monsters.
He was all keenness to cook and eat his catch, but Jack and Tari put
their veto upon it.
As the rolling-stone explained, only the inhabitants of an atoll can tell
what particular fish are poisonous and what are not, and on each
atoll they vary according to the phases of the coral.
Tari stated that this strange poisoning of the fish changed according
to the position of the planet Venus. This is the general belief among
all South Sea Islanders, but of the two theories Jack's was more
probably the correct one.
Jim, foiled in his fishing for fear of poisonous fish or fish with
poisonous spines, turned his attention to shell-collecting, and he
soon had quite a quantity heaped up, each one having the usual red
spots which cover both shells, coral, and shellfish on an atoll.
It was a very pleasurable experience for the adventurous boy, this
picnicing life on a coral island, and, though he said nothing, he felt
keenly disappointed when departure was decided upon.
He dreaded a renewal of the open-boat trials and sufferings, and if
the choice had rested with him there would have been no
relaunching of the whaleboat.
After nearly three weeks on the island, of rest and recovering from
the late trying times, they one day launched the boat out through the
surf, and, with a good load of cocoanuts, headed away before the
south-east trades for Papeete.
Hour after hour went by as the buoyant little craft ran gaily before the
steady trade wind, with a new pioneer at the steering-oar in the
shape of Mr. Bill Benson, late bosun's mate of Her Majesty's gunboat
Dido.
"She weren't a bad little bug-trap as things go, an' no Callao ship
neither," pronounced the navy-man, speaking of his late ship as they
took their midday tiffin. "She was too top-'eavy, though, to my likin'
for rough weather; the owner, too, was a bit wet on muslin. It was
enuff to give one fits to see the way 'e carried on in that little 'ooker.
Stunsails, mind you, on the fore, reg'lar old style. She could sail, too,
an' weren't such a bad model, on'y 'er bally old nose sp'iled the 'ole
effec'. I've passed many a Chinee junk in 'er under sail, an' some o'
them ain't no slouches neither with wind to suit them.
"Her engines, though—oh, Lord! just a lot o' scrap-iron. You'd 'ear
the tink-tink o' the bloomin' tiffy's 'ammerin' an' repairin' all day long.
And b'ilers—oh, my! them wretched artificers spent mos' of their time
crawlin' about on their bellies, tinkerin' of 'em.
"There weren't never no time wasted. D'rectly they wos cool enuff to
boil a lump er ice, in them pore sweat-rags 'ad to go, creepin' an'
crawlin' on dunnage wood so as their feet shouldn't catch fire; then
presently out they'd come, legs first, cooked to a turn an' 'most
senseless. An' the way she wasted steam through 'er numerous
cracks an' chinks would 'ave made the bloomin' Chancellor o' the
Excheq'r go muzzy.
"That were 'er on'y defec', though; otherwise she wos a' appy ship.
Full er talent, too. Gunnery very fair, footer team first chop, the
dramy a bloomin' constellation o' stars o' the first magnitude, finest
squee-jee band in the Pacific, whilst our Jimmy Bungs[14] was er
artist on the cinder-track. Wot more d'you want? But I guess my jaw-
tackle's workin' too free. Give that cocoa-juice a fair wind, will ye,
sonny," and he pointed to the pile of cocoanuts amidships.
"Do you-alls reckon that this war-canoe o' yours is browsin' around
anyways handy hereabouts?" inquired Broncho.
"She was diggin' out for a bit er cannibalisin' through the Line Islands
when I took my fancy dive."
"Then I surmise that we can diskyard the war-canoe from our hand
as bein' wo'thless."
"I don't think we are likely to get picked up," said Jack, from the
bottom of the boat. "The Paumotus are far from being popular with
Island traders, and we are much too far to the west for any of the
Cape Horners."
"That's so," admitted the bosun's mate. "We came through the
Paumotus in the old Dido, an' did some fancy navigatin' at that,
scrapin' our weeds off on coral reefs, an' jammin' through tide-rip
channels with the wind jumpin' all round the compass. I went all cold
up my back more'n once, muckin' through them bloomin' reefs."
"Ain't we goin' to stop at any of the islands on the way?" asked Jim
anxiously.
"Not if we can help it," replied the rover. "I had a bit of trouble in the
Low Archipelago once, and haven't forgotten it. You remember, Lolie,
in the old Moonbeam?"
"Yes," muttered the woman, and shivered.
"Cawpse an' cartridge occasion, Jack?" inquired the cowpuncher in
his off-hand way.
"Pretty near. Shooting in the South Seas is more noise than
business though, sometimes."
"Every tuppeny bust-up is a 'orrible war. One copper-coloured coon
with a slit skin will give t'other side a big vict'ry. Some er these Low
Islands, howsomedever, is 'most perishin' for long-pig stakes, an'
enjoys massacretin' whites now and agen if they gets the chaunce,"
said Bill Benson.
The afternoon passed in tobacco-smoke and siestas, and with the
stars came back Jack's eyesight, which event always seemed to
give him renewed life.
"Out of it, Bill," he cried, springing to his feet. "It's my wheel now, and
your watch below."
"Them sidelights o' yours is the most mysterious be'aved optics I's
ever shipmates with. I think you oughter adopt more drastic
measures than them blighted bandages. Them eyes o' yours have
run outer oil or somethin', or mebbe wants trimmin'," exclaimed the
bosun's mate as he shifted places.
"The nerve's gone wrong somehow."
"It's that 'ere luminary that puts the hobbles on 'em. It was him cold-
decked you, Jack," asserted Broncho.
"The moon's responsible for a lot of trouble in this world," said Jack.
"You never know the way it will strike you, either. Some people who
get moon-struck can only see in the daytime; others get their faces
screwed up, and some go half-witted; but I'm hoping that perhaps
when the moon changes my eyes will improve."
"Do you really think that, Jack? Oh, I do hope so, with all my heart,"
exclaimed Loyola earnestly.
"Wall, you've only three sun-ups to wait, Jack, if you allow that's your
high kyard," announced Broncho.
"Mebbe they've got eroded an' won't render, but if it's the blessed
moon you've manœuvred up against, I've heard tell that folks that is
hoodooed that way, such as lunattics an' paralytic jokers, gets worse
at the full moon. Don't you butter your dough too much on that idee,"
observed Bill wisely.
"The trades are going to leave us," put in the rover abruptly, after a
keen look at the sky.
"Goin' to have more calm?" asked Jim anxiously.
"Well, doldrum weather, I expect."
"Ca'm weather kinder palls on one," drawled Broncho disgustedly,
"'an it's shore onheathful, an' liable to make a gent feel moody an'
bad; but if it's a forced play, we makes it ontil somethin' goes pop."
"Don't you jokers go manufacturin' trouble. Your joints'll tingle just the
same when it does come alongside, an' if it do keep below the
horizon, you're frettin' your brain-cases 'bout nothin'," said Bill
reprovingly.
"'Last Post's' gone; it's about 'Lights Out,'" announced Jack. "Shy us
over that almanac before you bed down, Jim. I'll take a star
presently."
"I'm going to stand watch with you, Jack," declared Loyola decisively,
getting up and seating herself by his side in the sternsheets.
So it was decided that these two should take the first watch, Bill
Benson and Tari the middle, and Jack again the morning, as he
could not trust either Broncho or Jim sufficiently with the dead
reckoning.
The night passed quietly with but little wind. Loyola insisted on again
bearing Jack company in his lonely vigil from four to eight, and after
breakfast these two lay down in the bottom of the boat and slept
soundly till near midday, awaking to find a big change in the weather.
The whaleboat was going close-hauled into a dead head wind. She
was right off her course, heading a point to the east of north.
The Pacific sparkled under the strength of the tropical sun, and there
was a heavy swell running from the nor-west.
On different quarters of the horizon rain-squall clouds hovered black
and wind-torn.
The breeze blew fitfully, and occasionally came in stronger puffs,
which heeled the whaleboat over till her garboard streak showed to
windward.
It had evidently been blowing hard somewhere below the north-west
horizon, to account for the long hills of water rolling in from that
direction.
The atmosphere seemed very clear, and the surf, breaking on a line
of reef about a mile to the north, showed up plainly, as if it was only a
cable-length off.
In the west the rain was falling heavily and the sea was torn up by it,
a well-defined line of white water denoting the edge of the squall.
Loyola, with the first instinct of a sailor, took a keen look to windward
as she rose from her recumbent position.
"We're going to have a blow," she announced quietly, turning to the
rolling-stone, who was slowly filling his pipe with a clumsiness
caused by his blindness.
"Are we?" he muttered indifferently.
"You're right, ma'm," broke in Bill. "The wind broke off soon arter you
turned in, an' 'as been very unsteady ever since."
"Coming out of the nor-west," went on the woman calmly; "a nasty
quarter in these seas."
"Can you locate us at all, Jack?" inquired Broncho.
"What's your dead reckoning for the last four hours?" asked the
rover.
"We've been headin' a point off north most o' the time," returned Bill
Benson, "and ain't averaged more'n two knots an hour."
"St. Jean Baptiste can't be far below the horizon in the nor-west,"
said Jack, after making a rapid mental calculation.
"Pass me over the sextant and I'll get a noon sight," observed Loyola
quietly.
Bill stared in astonishment, and ejaculated half under his breath,
"Blawst me, but she's a sailor's daughter an' no mistake."
"She was four years old when Big Harry brought her out to the South
Seas in the old Moonbeam. When he lost his money he turned the
yacht into a trader, and kept his daughter with him, as she had no
mother, and she's been at sea most of the time ever since,"
explained Jack in a low voice, as this sea-maiden ogled the sun.
Silently they watched her. This taking of the sun to the uninitiated
always seems a most mysterious and wonderful operation, and
Broncho, Jim, and the bluejacket stared with eyes full of awe and
admiration.
The sun was now close to the meridian, and presently the woman
called out,
"Make eight bells!"
Jack laughingly beat the notes of the bell with a spoon on the barrel
of his six-shooter.
"Throw me over the almanac and tables, Jim," cried Loyola coolly,
and a minute later she announced their latitude.
"Think we're in for some dirt, Lolie?" inquired the rolling-stone
casually.
"Sure of it! What you say, Tari?"
"Missee qui' right, big blow by-an'-by."
"I hope not," said the boy anxiously. "In an open boat there ain't no
joke in it."
"I'm with you, Jim," declared the cowboy. "I'd rayther be lost in a
blizzard a whole lot with a good hoss under me, than be upheaved
an' junked about on this here onrestful sea."
Presently the wind died away completely, and the boat lay rolling
helplessly on the swell, her sails flapping.
The afternoon passed slowly. Bill, in the bottom of the boat, lay face
downwards, apparently dozing. Jim, next him, was listening with
open eyes to one of Broncho's cattle-yarns. Tari, in the bows, slept
placidly; and in the stern sat Jack and Loyola, conversing in low
tones.
None of the boat's crew noticed the rapidly approaching change of
weather. Loyola had her back turned to the heavy squall rising so
rapidly, and neither Broncho nor Jim perceived it until the blind man
cried suddenly,
"I smell wind!"
One glance was enough. Up sprang Loyola, and, seizing the
steering-oar, with one long stroke she swept the boat's head round.
Then with a screech the wind fell upon them. The boat gave a violent
lurch and lay down to it, the water pouring in over the gunwale.
Broncho and Jim, taken completely by surprise, were tumbled to
leeward on top of the bosun's mate, who was half drowned before
they could extricate themselves, whilst Jack was awkwardly groping
about in a vain effort to get in the awning.
The woman steered superbly, and her clear voice rang like a bell
above the squall as she called to Bill to get hold of the sheet before
the sail flogged itself to rags.
The rain fell in solid sheets, and the sea hissed as it beat upon it.
The boat, rushing madly before the wind, rocked wildly, and dipped
her rail under at each roll; whilst Jack, in a foot of water, baled
furiously to keep pace with the rain; the other four struggled
desperately with the maddened sail. Loyola, hanging on to the long
oar with her strong young arms, stood swaying gracefully to the
motion of the boat, as, calm and watchful, she held it steady.
The sunshine fled below the horizon to the south-east, chased by a
mass of heavy, threadbare clouds, which came pelting across the
sky.
The sail was quickly muzzled and close-reefed, and Loyola
cautiously brought the wind on to the quarter, feeling its strength with
practised hand.
But it was more than the brave boat could stand, and a sea washed
over the rail which nearly filled her.
"Down that sail!" yelled Jack, whilst he and Jim baled with furious
energy. "Down that sail!"
After the first tremendous downpour the rain fell steadily, but with
less weight. Meanwhile both wind and sea commenced to rise, and
though the whaleboat rode the big rollers splendidly, many of the
smaller waves slopped aboard and kept the balers hard at work.
With the sail off her, Loyola swung the boat's head up into the wind,
and held her with the steering-oar from falling off.
"Lemme relieve you, ma'm," called the man-of-war's man,
clambering aft.
"I'm all right," answered the plucky woman. "Give the balers a spell."
"What's the glass say?" jerked out the blind man, panting with his
exertions.