ABSTRACT
For someone whose thoughts haven’t been tainted by postwar analytical philosophy, the most plausible answer to this chapter’s question must be “Yes, of course!” There are tons of laws in economics and elsewhere:
• the law of supply and demand (“As the price for a good rises [falls], its quantity supplied goes up [down] and its quantity demanded goes down [up]; as the demand [supply] for a good goes up, its price increases [decreases]”; cf. Kincaid 2004);
• Okun’s law (“The change in the unemployment rate is inversely related to the growth rate of output”; cf. Knotek 2007);
• Say’s law (“Supply creates its own demand”; cf. Chang 2014); • the iron law of wages (“In the long run, real wages tend towards subsistence level”;
cf. Baumol 1983); • the iron law of oligarchy (“Any democratic organization will tend, in the long run, towards rule
by an elite”; cf. Hyland 1995, 247); • Malthus’s law of population (“Population growth is exponential”; cf. Ariew 2007); • the law of superposition (“In undeformed stratigraphic sequences, the upper units of stratica-
tion are younger and the lower older”; cf. Harris 1979); • Zipf’s law (“Given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is
inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table”; cf. Fagan and Gençay 2010); • Duverger’s law (“Plurality rule elections structured within single-member districts tend to
favor a two-party system”; cf. Schlesinger and Schlesinger 2006);
and many more. So there are laws, QED. The chapter could end right here. But we are postwar analytical philosophers and must therefore endeavor to nd a y in the ointment. The y is the claim that these aren’t real laws. They may carry the name of laws-perhaps because they are particularly entrenched principles or their authors want to reify the principles they’ve discovered
by calling them laws-but they are not genuine because they are ridden with exceptions, merely ‘phenomenological’, subject to vague ‘ceteris paribus’ clauses and so on. So a better title for this chapter would be: “Are There Real Social Scientic Laws?”
