 Until the second half of the 20th century, certain characteristics of laws of nature were taken for granted by philosophers of science: Laws of nature were taken to be true, logically contingent, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. Laws were taken to play a major role in explanation, induction, confirmation, causation, and in counterfactual reasoning. The paradigm cases for such laws were taken from (fundamental) physics. Newton’s second law \((F=ma)\) or the Schrödinger-equation fit the bill of the traditional concept of a law of nature. Philosophers of science were aware of the fact that there are hardly any universal laws of this kind in biology, psychology, economics or other special sciences. This posed no problem as long as there was a consensus that this might be conceived as a shortcoming of the special sciences. However, with the success especially of the biological sciences it became clear that there is genuine scientific knowledge that does not conform to the paradigm of physics. As a consequence, scientific practice in the special sciences was no longer taken to be deficient but was analyzed as a legitimate practice different from physics. The generalizations of the special sciences including biology, psychology, and economics seem to differ in an important way from the generalizations of fundamental physics. In order to illustrate this difference, here are some examples of generalizations that play an explanatory role in various special sciences: