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Resumo

Sociologists are not eager to talk about laws, and there is little work done towards formulating laws in the social sciences. Naïve ideas about laws, which see them as singular and exceptionless entities, are easy prey for common attacks against social scientific laws. I argue that the general avoidance of talking about laws of sociology is based on misconceptions about what laws are like in the natural sciences. In this paper, common arguments against social scientific laws are taken under scrutiny and rejected. Overly strict definitions of laws will rob not only the social sciences but almost all sciences of laws. Scientific laws are inherently related to causality. For a good definition of laws, we need to rely on the regularity view of causation. I agree with the web-of-laws approach that laws are a set of axioms that are derived from causal regularities in the state of affairs of the world. I will then argue that laws are necessary for the social sciences to become mature in Kuhnian terms.

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