There are two strategies to which empiricist accounts of causal laws are forced to resort in the face of open systems. Strong actualism is the view that complete state descriptions supporting causal laws exist, and are universal, but are not known. The empiricist analysis of laws thus becomes a regulative ideal, an unachieved empiricism (SRHE 29). Weak actualism is the view that causal laws only apply in closed systems, so laws are known but not universal (SRHE 28-9). Weak actualism is an empiricism that can be achieved in practice, but it leaves phenomena in open systems unexplained.
Copyright © 1997 Louis Irwin
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