In the classical tradition, natural laws were considered as eternal truths of the world. Galileo and Newton even proclaimed them as ‘thoughts of God’ represented by mathematical equations. In Kantian tradition, they became categories of the human mind. David Hume criticized their ontological status and demanded their reduction to habituations of sentiments and statistical correlations of observations. In mainstream twentieth-century century science, laws were often understood as convenient instruments only, or even deconstructed in Feyerabend's ‘anything goes’. However, the Newtonian paradigm of mathematical laws and models seems also to be extended to the life sciences (e.g. systems biology). Parallel to the developments in the natural sciences, a change of public meaning regarding laws in society can be observed over the last few centuries. In economics, experimental, statistical, and behavioural approaches are favoured. In any case, the ontological basis of laws, sometimes blamed as ‘Platonism’, seems to be lost. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the question arises: Are laws still important concepts of science? What is their contemporary meaning and task in different disciplines? Are there already alternative concepts or do laws remain an essential concept of science? In the following, we consider (1) the universal concept of laws; (2) the dynamical concept of laws; (3) their applications in natural and technical systems; (4) their applications in social and economic systems; and finally (5), we emphasize the instrumental concept of laws.

This paper critically discusses different philosophical conceptions of laws of nature by examining how putative laws are treated in physical theorizing. These different conceptions are, first, views that take laws to be metaphysically basic; second, Humean views, which take laws to be reducible to patterns of instantiations of non-modal properties; and, third, a cluster of conventionalist or instrumentalist views that understand laws as part of the epistemic toolkit for building models and a reflection of a particular perspective of investigation. I argue that scientific practice best supports a moderate version of the third view: while the laws of physics do not form a single tightly organized axiomatic structure and there exists a multiplicity of frameworks in which putative laws are justified by their predictive use and relevance in a particular context, general overarching principles nevertheless play an important role in physics and provide some integration of different domains.

After a brief introduction to the basic concepts including some questions of language, the first part of this paper provides a brief survey of the historical development of laws and models in Chemistry, in particular atomic and molecular models. In the second part this paper deals with the fundamental role of the observation of symmetry violations in physics and chemistry in understanding the most ‘fundamental laws’ and current efforts towards such studies by means of high resolution spectroscopy of molecules. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications for current unsolved problems in astrophysics and biology.

Although the notion of God as the legislator of nature was already known in the Jewish-Christian tradition, the modern concept of laws of nature was established only in the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy of nature, particularly by Descartes and Newton, and remained largely confined to that tradition before it became seriously questioned in quantum mechanics. After a brief historical survey, I first discuss various examples of so-called laws of nature in chemistry and physical chemistry proposed in the nineteenth century to conclude that none of them really correspond to the original concept, but that they rather comprise a variety of epistemologically different statements. More recent philosophical approaches to extend the concept of laws, so as to cover chemical cases, all result in inacceptable consequences. The deeper reason of the comparatively little importance of natural laws, I finally argue, is that chemistry as the original epitome of the experimental or Baconian science has largely followed methodological pluralism in which a variety of models to be chosen from for pragmatic reasons are preferred over universal laws of nature as in mathematical physics.

The new research field of synthetic biology is emerging from molecular biology, chemistry, biotechnology, information technology and engineering. This paper describes synthetic biology as a ‘Science of the Artificial’ and identifies structural features of engineering sciences that can be applied to this new kind of biology as opposed to traditional biology. The search for laws already in traditional biology has been difficult. In Synthetic Biology, action and application stand in the foreground and laws increasingly lose ground as a meaningful concept.

The large number of discoveries in the last few decades has caused a scientific crisis that is characterised by overspecialisation and compartmentalisation. To deal with this crisis, scientists look for integrating approaches, such as general laws and unifying theories. Representing what can be considered a general form law, the operator hierarchy is used here as a bridge between existing integrating approaches, including: a cosmic timeline, hierarchy and ontology, a periodic table of periodic tables, the unification of evolutionary processes, a general evolution concept, and general aspects of thermodynamics. At the end of the paper an inventory of unifying concepts is presented in the form of a cross table. The study ends with a discussion of major integrating principles in science.

Several philosophers of biology have argued for the claim that the generalizations of biology are historical and contingent.1–5 This claim divides into the following sub-claims, each of which I will contest: first, biological generalizations are restricted to a particular space-time region. I argue that biological generalizations are universal with respect to space and time. Secondly, biological generalizations are restricted to specific kinds of entities, i.e. these generalizations do not quantify over an unrestricted domain. I will challenge this second claim by providing an interpretation of biological generalizations that do quantify over an unrestricted domain of objects. Thirdly, biological generalizations are contingent in the sense that their truth depends on special (physically contingent) initial and background conditions. I will argue that the contingent character of biological generalizations does not diminish their explanatory power nor is it the case that this sort of contingency is exclusively characteristic of biological generalizations.

The debate on the existence of laws in individual and social behaviour dates back to the very beginnings of economics as a modern science. In adopting the concept of natural laws from classical mechanics, economics originally evolved as ‘social physics.’ But is it really appropriate to transfer the idea of precise and accurate laws to social life and social science? We attempt to answer this question by scrutinizing the methodological foundations of the discipline. In particular, this paper addresses the concepts of rationality, historicity, and objectivity – all located at the very heart of economics and all essential in developing a viable, empirically corroborated theory to face and embrace economic complexity.

Beginning with a quotation of Karl Popper about the difference between natural (physical) and normative law, the normative notion of law is explained as a product of cultural development. In the field of normative law there exists a distinction between laws made by human authorities in a formal procedure and natural law perceived by human reason, often entering into common law and statutory law (e.g. human rights). Law corresponds with reality in the sense that relevant aspects of reality are transcribed by abstract notions and combined with legal consequences. There exists a hierarchy of laws, a pre-eminent position of the legislative over other state functions and the supremacy of the constitution