Is the D-N model enough to provide support for a certain law?

Question

tell me more about causation and counter examples

Answer 1

In the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, natural philosophers like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton started offering a new kind of explanation for things. They said that the motions of bodies could be accounted for by deducing their behaviors them from basic mathematical statements of regularities (laws). Thus the ancient and medieval idea of explanation in terms of forms (from Aristotle) came to be replaced with the idea of explanation in terms of deduction from "laws of nature." This became the “Deductive-Nomological” Model (or “D-N model) of Scientific Explanation. (The term “nomological” refer to laws.)

According to the DN model of explanation, explanations are basically just predictions.

But the problem is that some sciences, like evolutionary biology and geology produce explanations that are considered acceptable scientific explanations, but are utterly incapable of predicting the phenomena they study.

Your reference to causation makes me think of David Hume, who pointed out that we can never predict anything in the future with complete confidence because we cannot be certain that the laws of nature will be the same in the future. We can only base predictions on past behavior, but how do we know that the laws of the past will apply in the future?

Answer 2

Causation is the special case of a prequisite condition.