348 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



concepts from the point of view of the triadic pattern em- 

 ployed in the preceding chapters. 



However, the interrelation of the two concepts makes a 

 separate examination of each of them unnecessary. A causal 

 correlation of events is obviously a special type of repeated 

 association; hence if a law represents the repetition of con- 

 nections between events, a causal law will represent a 

 specifiable kind of connection. The notion of cause enters 

 into science — if it enters into science at all — only in associa- 

 tion either with causal laws as stated in symbols, or with 

 causal ties as holding between events. But in either case the 

 notion of law is directly involved. Consequently, the dis- 

 cussion in the present chapter will center about the notion of 

 law, of which causal laws will be shown to be a special case. 



law: empirical foundation 



However nominalistic one may be in his attitude toward 

 scientific law, considering it merely as "conceptual short- 

 hand" or "convention," he is obliged to recognize that there 

 is something at the empirical level to which it has direct or 

 indirect reference. Nature, even to the most skeptical, ex- 

 hibits approximate uniformities, repeated associations, re- 

 current sequences, or something of an equivalent character. 

 As was pointed out in Chapter VI, 1 events have the property 

 of occurring together — occasionally, frequently, or univer- 

 sally. While the events themselves do not properly recur, 

 since an event is unique in any situation in which it occurs, 

 nevertheless approximately similar events do occur in other 

 situations and often with approximately the same asso- 

 ciates. This fact demands recognition in any symbolic 

 scheme, for it suggests that the repeated association of an 

 event of one kind with an event of another kind is an im- 

 portant bit of information about the character of each of the 

 events. As a consequence, the symbolic statement of this 

 repeated correlation, which is called a law, has informative 

 importance with reference to the meanings of the concepts 



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