A Meta-Theory of Objective Law Discovery

For over two millennia, human civilization has repeatedly asked “What is truth?” and “What is a law?”—yet almost never asked a more basic, more decisive question: how are laws actually discovered? This neglected question is the key to understanding why natural science has been able to produce continuously convergent, cross-cultural, reliable knowledge, while philosophy and other knowledge systems, despite equally long histories, have not. We propose a meta-theory of objective law discovery. It separates the ontological definition of law from its epistemic conditions of reliable identification, distinguishes four historical modes by which claims to law have been generated, and proposes five necessary conditions for reliable law discovery—empirical accessibility, intersubjective testability, falsifiability, revisability, and revisable cumulativity—situating these explicitly as both an inheritance from and a departure from Popperian critical rationalism. We directly confront every classical challenge this framework faces: Hume’s problem of induction, the demarcation problem and its historical dissolution, the evolutionary contingency thesis, the realism/anti-realism debate in philosophy of science, and the theory’s own self-referential status (addressed through inference to the best explanation and the literature on epistemic circularity, rather than a simple appeal to “empirical generalization”). We argue that natural science exhibits the strongest historical record of reliable law discovery because its methodology internally satisfies these five conditions, generating a self-reinforcing mechanism supported by the social epistemology literature. Our central claim is deliberately qualified as “the method system with the most extensive historical track record” rather than a claim that logically excludes all alternatives; traditional philosophy, religion, and ideology are not “failures” but rather knowledge systems that never established, at the methodological level, a law-generation mechanism satisfying these conditions. We close by proposing a rationally reconstructed integrative model of discovery, and explain how this meta-theory provides methodological foundations for the companion study The Empirical Grounding of Philosophical Premises and the “Natural Human Philosophy” (NHP) research program.