Generalizations that attempt to describe and explain recurring facts or events in nature by means of scientific laws. Attempts to achieve to this include, for example, Boyle’s law, Hooke’s law, Kepler’s law of planetary motion, Newton’s laws of motion, the Weber-Fechner law, and the law of effect. Most of these laws submit to two general laws of change. The laws of succession, also known as genetic explanations, are an account (i.e., the explanans) of a sequence of events leading to the occurrence of a fact that has to be explained (i.e., the explanandum). Common in history, geology and biology, they take the form if x has a property P at time time t, then x has property B at time t +1 according to Ernest Nagel (1901-1985). Characteristic of research on motor development until recently, they are not explanations, but descriptions of relatively invariant sequences of functional changes. The laws of co-existence attempt to account for spatial and temporal regularities in the behavior of a system by relating the actions of its different components to each other. When one component changes, a new state of co-existence may emerge in which the system’s output consists of qualitatively different spatial and temporal properties. The laws of co-existence actually underpin current dynamical systems approaches to development as both address the problem of trying to account for the making and remaking of successive states of co-existence.
See Causal determinism, Causality (in philosophy), Constraint, Deductive-nomological (D-N) model, Dynamical systems approaches, Emergence, Explanation, Law, Motor development, Newton’s laws of motion, Serial homology (or homonomy), Systemic causality