The difficulty, of course, is that the candidate non-law explanatory factors at issue (e.g., an ideological commitment to the platforms of the Republican Party) are not plausible candidates for being legal norms, on any existing theory of the concept of law.
Many modern accounts of Aquinas' theory of natural law give explanatory primacy to the naturalness of the inclinations (to live, to know, etc).
The problem with assuming laws are required for explanation is their relative absence from a variety of successful sciences routinely offering explanations, not that no scientist ever appeals to laws as explanatory.
Because the theory or general law offers an explanatory framework, which is essential to how a scientific explanation satisfy people: "… When you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens?
Against the universalism of explanatory laws, Cartwright has argued that laws cannot be both universal and true; there exist only patchworks of laws and local cooperation.
Noam Chomsky, for instance, has said: "It is quite possible... that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology". The reason is that science tries to formulate general explanatory laws which apply universally, which were in operation before they were discovered, and which would have been discovered sooner or later by somebody.
We therefore expect that it will be the acoustic properties, and not the 'content' properties that figure in the pertinent explanatory laws.
7. Berlin acknowledged that there were certain human sciences that sought to emulate the aims of the natural sciences, by trying to discover regularities in human behaviour, and refining them into explanatory laws.
Kim would reply that Davidson is only interested in rejecting strict descriptive (i.e., explanatory, predictive) laws, not strict normative laws (see below).
Some (Armstrong 1991, Dretske 1977) think that the framework supports the idea that laws play a special explanatory role in inductive inferences, since a law is not just a universal generalization, but is an entirely different creature — a relation holding between two other universals.
