The idea of statistical law in nineteenth century science

Władysław Krajewski

pp. 397-405

in: Robert S. Cohen, Mark W. Wartofsky (eds), Methodological and historical essays in the natural and social sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1974

Abstract

It is now generally recognised that there are two main types of laws. Laws of the first type establish a simple correspondence between two or more parameters; they are fulfilled in each individual case (usually only approximately in real phenomena but we shall not consider this question here). There are different names for this type: "dynamical", "deterministic", "causal"," simple", "nonstatistical" etc. Laws of the second type are fulfilled only by large sets of events. They are called" statistical", sometimes "probabilistic" or" stochastic". Here we shall consider only the latter type.