Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011) |Abstract||Laws of
nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are
usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many
important key concepts such as causation, explanation,
confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally,
philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which
were taken to be at least true, universal statements that
support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about
laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special
sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) appear to
have—maybe not surprisingly—different features than the laws of
physics. Special science laws—for instance, the economic law
“Under the condition of perfect competition, an increase of
demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that
the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constant” and, in
biology, Mendel's Laws—are usually taken to “have exceptions”,
to be “non-universal” or “to be