No, it's not a semantic argument. It's a historical one. The point is that the early-modern scientific talk of laws was bound up with deism, which is what mixed up natural and social laws. God was supposed to be such a masterful legislator that everything in nature followed his commandments, whereas we're free to break our social laws because we're not all-powerful or all-knowing. We're not smart enough to devise laws that we'd always follow, nor are we powerful enough to enforce them without missing anything. The early talk of "laws of nature" was based on this misleading deistic analogy, and now we're stuck with rationalizing it.