The comparative analysis of epistemological distinctions between laws in classical, non-classical and post-non-classical science

The author admits that the laws of science represent a distinctive feature of the contemporary type of science which developed through classical, non-classical and post-non-classical stages. This article is the first attempt in Russian and foreign epistemology to give a comparative analysis of distinctive features of science laws for these stages. The empirical material of the article is investigations of the contemporary type of science law made by scientists (such as Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Ilya Prigogine, and others) and by those who analyse science laws from a philosophical position (such as Auguste Comte, Alexander Koyre, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper). The results of the study are the following. Classical science comes to a recognition of the law's priority meaning in a scientific research, which acquires features of a universal, immutable and natural relation between observable phenomena in their static and dynamic aspects, and which possesses a foresight function. Laws of non-classical science relate with different aspects of subjectivity. Einstein gave a new meaning to static and dynamic laws; he introduced the concept of a structural law. Based on thermodynamics, Eddington discovered the time's arrow; when making a distinction between primary and secondary laws, he came to recognise the historical character of laws. The distinctive features of post-non-classical science laws can be verbalised as historical and genetic laws. This type of laws relates to the idea of internal time opposite to the idea of external time, the latter being the foundation of classical and non-classical science. Internal time as an “average age of a state” of any system transforms it into a historical structure, so laws tell us how a system occurs and what its sources are as well as how and into what it will transform. The historical and genetic character of post-non-classical science laws is directly opposite to the structural laws of non-classical science, like the internal is opposite to the external.

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