Law (principle)

A law is a universal principle that describes the fundamental nature of something, the universal properties and the relationships between things, or a description that purports to explain these principles and relationships.

Laws of nature

For example, physical laws such as the

a priori

laws governing human thought before any interaction whatsoever with experience).

Within most fields of study, and in science in particular, the elevation of some principle of that field to the status of law usually takes place after a very long time during which the principle is used and tested and verified; though in some fields of study such laws are simply postulated as a foundation and assumed. Mathematical laws are somewhere in between: they are often arbitrary and unproven in themselves, but they are sometimes judged by how useful they are in making predictions about the real world. However, they ultimately rely on arbitrary

axioms

.

Laws in social sciences

The question of whether "laws" can be applied to the social sciences in the same way as the natural sciences has been debated for many years. ^[1] Philosophers such as Lee McIntyre are optimistic that "law-like" explanations of human behavior can be valid and useful.^[1]

Laws of

modelization of economic behavior. Marxism criticized the belief in eternal laws of economics, which it considered a product of the dominant ideology. It claimed that in fact, those so-called laws of economics were only the historical laws of capitalism

, that is of a particular historical social formation. With the advent, in the 20th century, of the application of mathematical, statistical, and experimental techniques to economics, economic theory matured into a corpus of knowledge rooted in the scientific method rather than in philosophical argument.