Sayahpour, Saman (2026) On Laws Between Contexts. [Preprint]

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Abstract

ross-context regularities such as Okun’s Law hold across systems that generate them through demonstrably different mechanisms. Universalist accounts of social-scientific laws founder on their locality; invariance accounts operate within single systems; mechanism-based accounts of extrapolation predict failures that practice does not deliver. I argue that social-scientific laws are functorial invariants: each rule-constituted context is a small category whose objects are variables and whose morphisms are causal dependencies, and a law is the structure that functors between such categories preserve. Universal constructions reconstruct pattern-talk without reification; the faithful–full–equivalence hierarchy grades preservation. Okun’s Law and Duverger’s law illustrate the framework.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Sayahpour, Saman saman@cmu.edu 0009-0002-6177-1725
Keywords:	laws; social science; category theory; extrapolation; structural realism; Okun’s Law; Duverger’s law
Subjects:	General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics General Issues > Causation General Issues > Laws of Nature
Depositing User:	Saman Sayahpour
Date Deposited:	11 Jun 2026 12:34
Last Modified:	11 Jun 2026 12:34
Item ID:	30060
Subjects:	General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics General Issues > Causation General Issues > Laws of Nature
Date:	1 May 2026
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/30060

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