Is there greater explanatory power in laws governing things rather than being descriptive?

Question

If laws merely describe things in the world, then it seems that there is no reason for a particular object to behave according to a particular law the next moment.

If laws govern/order/command reality in some way or if there is something inherent to an object (lets call it a “power”) that governs how the object behaves according to a law, we now have an explanation for why an object continues to move or behave according to a certain pattern.

Does this mean that if laws or these lawlike causal powers are actually doing things or causing things rather than being merely descriptive, there is an explanatory advantage to the former?

EDIT: It seems that most people are misunderstanding what I mean here by laws of nature, even though the philosophical literature makes it clear as to what they mean. I am not referring to our human attempts to understanding these laws, but whatever the fundamental laws of nature actually are, irrespective of our knowledge. Some philosophers think that these fundamental laws, whether we know them or not, govern the universe. Others think that even if we could fully describe all the laws in the universe, they don’t actually govern anything. The question is if the former idea has greater explanatory power than the latter.

Answer 1

You are confusing how things are with how we think about them. Nature does not behave as it does because we have identified various so-called laws. Yes there are some underlying factors at play that cause a particular object to continue to appear to obey the laws we have identified, but most of the time we define laws that are purely descriptive, and do not address the cause of the behaviour described. Take Hooke's law, which describes the relationship between an applied force and the change in length of a spring- springs don't behave as they do because of Hooke's law, and the actual factors at play are vastly more complicated. Or take Fleming's left hand rule- wires carrying currents do not react to magnetic fields in a certain way because some Victorian engineer specified they must take note of the orientation of his digits.

Answer 2

Well, yes of course. If nature has to follow the "laws of nature" that we write down, we could perfectly predict it. By definition.

That doesn’t change that what we call "laws of nature" are models based on observations and thus descriptive. The "laws of nature" are in textbooks because that is where we put our descriptions from observations. Now, there might be some truly fundamental rules that actually govern nature, but all we can do is observe and try to describe them.

Answer 3

Is there greater explanatory power in laws governing things rather than being descriptive?

Of course, and the body of the question seems to recognize this. The latter kind of law provides for prediction, but no real explanation. The former provides explanation, albeit a somewhat unsatisfactory one, to wit: it is a characteristic of the universe, as it is today, that things behave according to such-and-such law. Of course, that does beg the metaphysical question of why the universe has that characteristic.

The question is moot, however, because we have no tools for discovering such governing natural laws. Our best tools and methods for exploring how the natural world works -- scientific ones -- are fundamentally built for and around interpreting our observations, thus they produce descriptive principles.

Scientists do generally work under the assumption that the perceived regularities of our universe are indeed grounded in fundamental natural characteristics. They do generally suppose that the scientific method is effective for discovering better and better approximations to those underlying natural laws. That seems to have been working well for centuries. But scientific "laws" are a predictive codification of observations, not to be confused with the true underlying characteristics of the natural universe. If ever we do come up with a scientific law that happens to exactly match a natural law, we have no way to recognize that we have done so.

Sometimes, a scientist will express that such and such scientific law / principle explains a given observation. This is pretty common, in fact. But such a claim should be taken as code for the observation being consistent with said law / principle, or else the claim should be taken as contingent on the law / principle being a close enough approximation to a true characteristic of the natural universe, or both. And that's ok.

Answer 4

If there are natural laws causing the universe to behave regularly, then those laws would explain why the universe behaves regularly. However, this would leave unexplained why there are natural laws in the first place. One option is to postulate these laws as brute facts. Alternatively, theists might argue that God designed the laws, but in that case, God would be the brute fact, and so on.

If there are no natural laws causing the universe to behave regularly, then the scientific or physical laws we typically refer to are simply efficient descriptions developed by humans to describe the apparent regularity of the universe. In this case, there would be nothing inherently forcing the universe to behave regularly in the first place. The fact that the universe seems to behave regularly would itself be a brute fact. Perhaps the universe will stop behaving regularly tomorrow, and if so, that too would be a brute fact. (See also: If the laws of nature are not metaphysically fundamental, what alternative explanations could account for the regularities observed in nature?)

Which hypothesis has more explanatory power? They all seem to predict essentially the same outcomes. If the universe continues to behave regularly, there is no way to determine which hypothesis is correct. However, if "miracles" are real, that might falsify the "laws of nature as fundamental" hypothesis and align with either God is real or laws are mere descriptions, and the universe can do whatever it wants.

Answer 5

Human derived "laws" of nature are codified descriptions of what nature has been seen to do. They help guide human understanding of nature.

Nature ignores our attempts to understand it and does what it darned well pleases. However, it is consistent enough that we can make reasonable predictions. A dropped rock will fall, and its fall can be described and predicted. If we find a case where our predictions don't work we change the model so they do.

Does nature have to be reasonably consistent with itself? Gods only know, but in our experience it has been, and if it wasn't it's unclear this reality could exist.

Addendum:

Stepping back for a moment: I think that what you have done is reintroduced the idea of a set of ideal abstractions that nature tries to follow, with more general laws replacing ideal geometric solids so more complexity is allowed.

Unfortunately, as has been true since the Greek philosophers got us started playing this game, the problem is that there seem to be no implications we can test that would distinguish between the two models. The laws-first formulation provides no help in discovering new laws or new details of the current laws. It doesn't seem to make any predictions that differ from the assumption that physicality is wholly physical. I see no way to prove it or refute it.

That may be my own limited vision. If you really want to pursue this, go for it. As far as I can tell it is as valid as most philosophy; it's consistent, it just isn't useful. Prove otherwise and you have something publishable, but until then I will pass. The model we have works: restating it this way seems to me to add questions without resolving any.

Answer 6

1. Laws of nature explain the phenomena we observe in nature. Most explanatory power is due to the fact that there are laws at all.

2. Originally humans considered the laws of nature to be both, prescriptive and descriptive. Examples are in India the concept of “dharma” and in Europe Anaximander’s philosophy of nature.

   Experience shows that social laws can be broken while laws of nature hold without exception – otherwise research continues until improved laws hold without these exceptions.

3. The current view: Laws of nature describe a behaviour, they explain. While social laws demand a certain conduct, they prescribe.

Answer 7

The previous answers appear to be plagued with semantic debates in the comments. However I'll try to be clear and use words in a way that everyone can agree with. My apologies if I state the obvious but that is only to establish a foundation.

A scientist observes a phenomenon. The scientist develops a hypothesis H that the observed variables appear to closely fit the equation x=(a^3)/b for some variables x, a and b. He then makes some predictions using this hypothesis and the universe's behaviour seems to agree with the predictions. His hypothesis and any theories based on it are merely a description.

Some time elapses. Perhaps a day, or perhaps five hundred years. We might even develop some underlying hypotheses out of which H emerges as an artifact.

Tomorrow, our certainty that the universe will agree with H is still not 1. That is, we are confident that information cannot travel faster than light (for example, unrelated to the above equation), but we can only be 99.999999999999...% sure.

Now, onto semantics. In the comments on another answer, a distinction between "laws" and "descriptions" was made. But somewhat confusingly, the word "law" is also used to mean "description":

Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. (ref)

The universe's behaviour follows a set of unknowable laws. We can only make descriptions of those laws. It is plausible that our descriptions reach a 1 to 1 correspondence with the laws, but we would never be 100% sure that they have.

We cannot achieve greater explanatory power by just assuming the descriptions are the laws.

Answer 8

Does this mean that if laws or these lawlike causal powers are actually doing things or causing things rather than being merely descriptive, there is an explanatory advantage to the former?

Only if we actually know what these laws are. If we don't know them, they can't be used as explanations, since explanations are by definition information that we impart to each other (someone has to do the explaining).

But we don't have any way of learning these laws directly. We create models and hypotheses, and then use experimentation and observation to confirm or refute them. But this process can never prove something to be an ultimate truth, only at best raise our confidence in the validity of the model.

So as much as we'd like to be able to explain why the universe works the way it does, all scientific knowledge is ultimately just descriptive. Scientific progress is basically just getting more and more detailed descriptions. Occam's razor also suggests that we should be able to find a simple model that encompasses all aspects of basic physics, a "theory of everything" (analogous to the way that electromagnetism unified electricity and magnetism). But even this would just be a model, we'd still have no explanation of why this is the fundamental law of the universe -- every discovery just raises new "why" questions.

As in many of my other answers, the analogy I like to make is a child's series of questions that start with "Why is the sky blue?" There's no true end possible, we're always left with "that's just the way it is."

Answer 9

Explanatory power is the same, but governing laws are a more fruitful assumption

Conceptually, the way the universe works could be according to fixed principles so that if planets move in more or less elliptical fashion around stars then this is due to something inherent and unchanging in the stars and planets which causes this. This inherent principle could be called a law, and if we observe this behaviour and can describe it formally, and thereby predict the future positions of planets then we can say that this is because what we formulate is successfully modelling the underlying law.

Alternatively, we could conceive the universe as being unpredictable in essence but in practice it often does behave predictably. So that for example all our observations show that planets move elliptically around stars but there is no reason in principle that they couldn't travel in a figure-of-eight pattern tomorrow. We could call that "whim" and say that the behaviour of the universe is subject to whim, but most of the time, at least while we humans have been around, the whim is that planets follow elliptical paths and that therefore we can describe them mathematically and make useful predictions.

Either conception could apply to the universe as we observe it, and allow us to conduct scientific investigation. However it would seem that the first conception would allow us greater confidence that scientific investigation won't ultimately turn out to be a waste of time. It would mean that we can hope that as one theory or model replaces another, we close in on a true understanding asymptotically. We might never quite get there, but we will continue getting closer. If Einstein's 4D space replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, that is because it brought us closer to "truth", whatever that might turn out to be. However under the latter conception, the distance between our theories and "truth" might wax and wane over time and at some point we might have to ditch Einstein and go back to Newton again.

I can imagine that now that we have science that gives us useful technology, either conception would allow us to keep going ahead in this fashion at least as long as science appears to "work". But if in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods most of us had had the latter conception, that the universe is ultimately subject to whim, then science might have never got started. The "ology" in scientific disciplines is a cognate of the word "logic", and "onomy" is a cognate of "nomos" which means law. Without the confidence that there is something logical and lawlike to be discovered, it would not make sense to investigate the world closely.

By the way, if you have read the Three Body Problem you will know that one of the subplots was the invading aliens attempting to undermine science by making the universe seem to behave in impossible ways.

Answer 10

You say:

I am not referring to our human attempts to understanding these laws, but whatever the fundamental laws of nature actually are, irrespective of our knowledge

This is a metaphysical presumption that these supposed "Laws" exist at all. What makes the scandal of induction scandalous, is the idea that there is no certainty such laws exist OR that once articulated, they are accurate and reliable. From WP:

the problem of induction can be framed in the following way: we cannot apply a conclusion about a particular set of observations to a more general set of observations. While deductive logic allows one to arrive at a conclusion with certainty, inductive logic can only provide a conclusion that is probably true.

From the article on scientific realism:

Scientific realism involves two basic positions... Second, it is the commitment that science will eventually produce theories very much like an ideal theory...

To say that laws exist independent of our best guess at laws is to presume they exist in the first place; and yet, for the secular scientist, laws are the product of human labors, not physical artifacts of the universe. Thus, they cannot exist independent of human language, observation, and inference. In such a world, how can they be assured to exist at all, then? Is there a law that there is always a better theory? (Maybe there is and I'm unaware of it.)

So, when you ask:

Is there greater explanatory power in laws governing things rather than being descriptive?

Laws are linguistic artifacts based in observation and reason that explain, predict, and describe. What a law is used for, be it description of behavior, a tool for predicting behavior, or an explanatory inference meant to relate to a potentially broader theory as in the relationship of scientific reduction, well, that's up to the agent using the law, and not something that inheres to the law itself, because whether language constitutes prediction, description, or explanation is a product of the broader context that the language finds itself employed within.

Answer 11

Is there greater explanatory power in laws governing things rather than being descriptive?

Yes. There are many objects that can only be described by behavior. The classic example is light.

I have no idea what light is but I can explain its behavior (wave or particle) under different conditions.

Black holes are another example. Our description of black holes is based on behavior that is predicted by theory (Gravitational Law).