Re: Natural Law, in the Rosennean sense...

Since there is so much confusion over what the concept of Natural Law means, I'm posting one of my father's discussions of the concept which will hopefully illuminate.

From page 58 of ?Life, Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life?, by Dr. Robert Rosen (Columbia University Press, New York, 1991:

Robert Rosen wrote:?In the present section, we shall see that the concept of a model provides in fact a general method for comparing entailment structures of any kind. Just as the Aristotelian analysis may be applied to any mode of entailment, so too can modeling relations be established, mutatis mutandis, between entailment structures of arbitrary kinds. I shall now indicated in particular how we can compare inferential entailment in a formal system with causal entailments, relating a bundle of phenomena that we extract from our ?ambience? and identify as a natural system.

A modeling relation between causal entailment in a natural system and syntactic entailment in a formal one provides a concrete embodiment of the concept of Natural Law. It is worth spending a moment discussing Natural Law, for it provides the explicit underpinning on which all of science rests.

Natural Law makes two separate assertions about the self and its ambience: 1.) The succession of events or phenomena that we perceive in the ambience is not entirely arbitrary or whimsical; there are relations (e.g.; causal relations) manifest in the world of phenomena. 2.) The relations between phenomena that we have just posited are, at least in part, capable of being perceived and grasped by the human mind, i.e.; by the cognitive self.

Science depends in equal parts on these two separate prongs of Natural Law. The first, which says something about the ambience, asserts that it is in some sense orderly enough to manifest relations or laws. Clearly, if this is not so, there can be no science, also no natural language, and most likely, no sanity either. So it is, for must of us at any rate, not too great an exercise of faith to believe this.

The second part of Natural Law says something about ourselves. It asserts that the orderliness of the ambience is (to some unspecified extent) discernible to, and even more, is articulable by, the self. It asserts then that the posited orderliness in the ambience can be matched by, or put into correspondence with, some equivalent orderliness within the self.

In other words, the first part of Natural Law is what permits science to exist in the abstract. The second part of Natural Law is what allows scientists to exist. Clearly, concrete science requires both. I am now going to show how the modeling relation provides an explicit embodiment of Natural Law. Specifically, the causal entailments manifested by a natural system provide the orderliness required of the ambience. Inferential entailment in a formal system is a way of providing the orderliness required of the self. The art of bringing the two into correspondence through the establishment of a definite modeling relation between them, is the articulation of the former within the latter; it is in effect science itself."

He goes on to discuss his various diagrams which illustrate different modeling relations. In so doing, he also defines what is necessary if we want our models to be useful in dealing with or learning about that which they model. Is there anyone on the list who doesn't have "Life, Itself"? Let me know, because I can post the next part if someone needs me to.