Thanks! OK, so I agree that normally in doing science we are fine with just predicting what will happen, there’s no need to decompose into Laws and Conditions.
Where we can predict, we do so by feeding a set of conditions into laws.
Second, (this is the way I went, with counterfactuals) science isn’t all about prediction. Part of science is about answering counterfactual questions like “what would have happened if...” And typically the way to answer these questions is by decomposing into Laws + Conditions and then doing a surgical intervention on the conditions and then applying the same Laws to the new conditions.
Methodologically, counterfactuals and predictions are almost the same thing. In the case of a
prediction , you feed an actual condition into your laws, in the case of a counterfactual, you feed in a non-actual. one.
Where we can predict, we do so by feeding a set of conditions into laws.
Methodologically, counterfactuals and predictions are almost the same thing. In the case of a prediction , you feed an actual condition into your laws, in the case of a counterfactual, you feed in a non-actual. one.