Laws Are Persistent Inductive Schemes

Abstract

The characteristic difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in our epistemic or inductive attitude towards them. This idea has dominated the discussion about lawlikeness in the last decades. Hence, ranking theory, with its resources of formalizing defeasible inductive reasoning seems ideally suited to explicate the idea in a formal way. This is what the paper attempts to do. Thus it turns out that a law is simply the deterministic analogue of a sequence of independent, identically distributed random variables. This entails that de Finetti's representation theorems can be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of laws thus conceived.