The Many Laws of the Periodic Table
Seifert, Vanessa A.
There are many—not just one—periodic laws in chemistry. These laws correspond to nonaccidental regularity relations about physical and chemical properties of (sets of) chemical elements. I support this by showing how these regularity relations can be understood from the perspective of a philosophical analysis of laws. Specifically, I show that these relations instantiate standard features associated with laws; they can be spelled out in terms of two standard accounts of laws; and they can cohere