Laws of nature are sometimes said to govern their instances. Spelling out what governance is, however, is an important task that has only recently received sustained philosophical attention. In the first part of this paper, I argue against the two prominent reductive views of governance—modal views and grounding views. Ruling out the promising candidates for reduction supports the claim that governance is sui generis. In the second part of this paper, I argue that governance is subject to a contingency requirement. (...) Laws govern their instances only if those instances are metaphysically contingent. I end by defending the resulting account of governance from two potential objections. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, every fact has an explanation. An important challenge to this principle is that it risks being a counterexample to itself. What explains why everything needs to be explained? My first goal is to distinguish two broad kinds of answers to this question, which I call “Humean Rationalism” and “Non-Humean Rationalism”. My second goal will be to defend the prospects of Humean Rationalism.

Some recent literature [Hicks, M. T. and van Elswyk. P., (2015) pp. 433-443, 2015; Bhogal, H. (2017), pp. 447-460] has argued that the non-Humean conceptions of laws of nature have a same weakness as the Humean conceptions of laws of nature. That is, both conceptions face an explanatory circularity problem. The argument is as follows: the Humean and the non-Humean conceptions of laws of nature agree that the law statements are universal generalisations; thus, both conceptions are vulnerable to an explanatory (...) circularity problem between the laws of nature and their instances. In this paper, I argue that Armstrong’s necessitarian view of laws of nature is invulnerable to this explanatory circularity problem. (shrink)

I provide a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern the evolution of events. I locate the source of governance in the content of law propositions. As such, I do not appeal to primitive notions of ground, essence, or production to characterize governance. After introducing the account, I use it to outline previously unrecognized varieties of governance. I also specify that laws must govern to have two theoretical virtues: explanatory power as well as a (...) theoretical virtue I call expansiveness. A theory is expansive, roughly, when it can do more with less. (shrink)

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

In this paper, I accomplish a conceptual task and a historical task. The conceptual task is to argue that (1) Einstein’s Principle of Separability (henceforth “separability”) is not a supervenience principle and that (2) separability and entanglement are compatible. I support (1) by showing that the conclusion of Einstein’s incompleteness argument would still follow even if one assumes that the state of a composite system does not supervene on the states of the subsystems, and by showing that what Einstein says (...) in “Quantum Mechanics and Reality” (1948) strongly suggests that separability is not a principle about how subsystem states relate to the state of composite systems. I support (2) by showing that if separability was incompatible with entanglement, then Einstein’s argument would be incoherent in a trivial way. Thus, by arguing for (1) and (2) I directly challenge what has been, and still is, a very common reading of separability. The historical task is to offer the first detailed review of the different ways in which separability has been defined by physicists and philosophers in the last 60 years. Among other things, such a review distinguishes three different definitions of the principle, and shows that since the 1990s and up until the present date, it became standard to take separability (as presented by Einstein) to be a supervenience principle. (shrink)

This chapter presents a typology of the different kinds of inductive inferences we can draw from our evidence, based on the explanatory relationship between evidence and conclusion. Drawing on the literature on graphical models of explanation, I divide inductive inferences into (a) downwards inferences, which proceed from cause to effect, (b) upwards inferences, which proceed from effect to cause, and (c) sideways inferences, which proceed first from effect to cause and then from that cause to an additional effect. I further (...) distinguish between direct and indirect forms of downwards and upwards inferences. I then show how we can subsume canonical forms of inductive inference mentioned in the literature, such as inference to the best explanation, enumerative induction, and analogical inference, under this typology. Along the way, I explore connections with probability and confirmation, epistemic defeat, the relation between abduction and enumerative induction, the compatibility of IBE and Bayesianism, and theories of epistemic justification. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature is, roughly, the view that the laws of nature are just patterns, or ways of describing patterns, in the mosaic of events. In this paper I survey some of the (many!) objections that have been raised to Humeanism, considering how the Humean might respond. And I consider how we might make a positive case for Humeanism. The common thread running through all this is that the viability of the Humean view relies on the Humean having (...) an importantly different conception of explanation to the anti-Humean. (shrink)

Non‐Humean theories of natural necessity invoke modally‐laden primitives to explain why nature exhibits lawlike regularities. However, they vary in the primitives they posit and in their subsequent accounts of laws of nature and related phenomena (including natural properties, natural kinds, causation, counterfactuals, and the like). This article provides a taxonomy of non‐Humean theories, discusses influential arguments for and against them, and describes some ways in which differences in goals and methods can motivate different versions of non‐Humeanism (and, for that matter, (...) Humeanism). In short, this article provides an introduction to non‐Humeanism concerning the metaphysics of laws of nature and natural necessity. (shrink)

Many philosophers take purportedly logical cases of ground ) to be obvious cases, and indeed such cases have been used to motivate the existence of and importance of ground. I argue against this. I do so by motivating two kinds of semantic determination relations. Intuitions of logical ground track these semantic relations. Moreover, our knowledge of semantics for first order logic can explain why we have such intuitions. And, I argue, neither semantic relation can be a species of ground even (...) on a quite broad conception of what ground is. Hence, without a positive argument for taking so-called ‘logical ground’ to be something distinct from a semantic determination relation, we should cease treating logical cases as cases of ground. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical picture (...) suggested by Humeanism. -/- I suggest that the Humean can respond to these objections not by rejecting this divergence, but by arguing that is appropriate. In particular the Humean can, in the spirit of Loewer (2012), distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanation — this is motivated by differing aims of explanation in science and metaphysics. And they can further leverage this into distinctions between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality and scientific and metaphysical possibility. We can use these distinctions to respond to the objections that the Humean faces. (shrink)

Inspired both by our ordinary understanding of the world and by reflection on science, anti-Humeanism is a growing trend in metaphysics. Anti-Humeans reject the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience that the world is “just one little thing and then another”, and argue instead that dispositions, powers, or capacities provide connection and activity in nature. But how exactly are we to understand the shared commitment of this anti-Humean movement? I argue that this kind of anti-Humeanism, at its most general level, is (...) to be understood neither as a view about ontology nor about fundamentality, but rather as a specific claim about what explains what. (shrink)

A long-standing charge of circularity against regularity accounts of laws has recently seen a surge of renewed interest. The difficulty is that we appeal to laws to explain their worldly instances, but if these laws are descriptions of regularities in the instances then they are explained by those very instances. By the transitivity of explanation, we reach an absurd conclusion: instances of the laws explain themselves. While drawing a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations merely modifies the challenge rather than (...) resolving it, I argue that it does point us towards an attractive solution. According to Humeanism, the most prominent form of the regularity view, laws capture information about important patterns in the phenomena. By invoking laws in scientific explanations, Humeans are showing how a given explanandum is subsumed into a more general pattern. Doing so both undermines a principle of transitivity that plays a crucial role in the circularity argument and draws out a central feature of the Humean approach to scientific explanation. (shrink)

Realists about laws of nature and their Humean opponents disagree on whether laws ‘govern’. An independent commitment to the ‘governing conception’ of laws pushes many towards the realist camp. Despite its significance, however, no satisfactory account of governance has been offered. The goal of this article is to develop such an account. I base my account on two claims. First, we should distinguish two notions of governance, ‘guidance’ and ‘production’, and secondly, explanatory phenomena other than laws are also candidates for (...) governance. My goal is to develop a unified account which captures both guidance and production as well as the governance of phenomena, such as essence and logical consequence. The account of governance I develop belongs to the family of modal accounts, which was popularized by David Armstrong, but it also employs essentialist resources. If successful, this modal-essentialist account not only reveals the costs that proponents of governance incur, but it also puts that important notion on a solid theoretical foundation. (shrink)

According to Humeanism about the laws, the laws of nature are nothing over and above certain kinds of regularities about particular facts. Humeanism has often been accused of circularity: according to scientific practice laws often explain their instances, but on the Humean view they also reduce to the mosaic, which includes those instances. In this paper I formulate the circularity problem in a way that avoids a number of controversial assumptions routinely taken for granted in the literature, and against which (...) many extant responses are therefore ineffective. I then propose a solution that denies the alleged Humean commitment that laws are explained by their instances. The solution satisfies three desiderata that other solutions don’t: it provides independent motivation against the idea that Humean laws are explained by their instances; it specifies the sense in which Humean laws are nonetheless “nothing over and above” their instances; and it gives an alternative account of what does explain the laws, if not their instances. This solution, I will argue, is not only the simplest but also the oldest one: it appeals only to tools and theses whose first appearance predates the earliest statements of the circularity problem itself. (shrink)

This paper presents a unified argument against three widely held contemporary analyses of lawhood—Humean reductionism about laws, the dispositionalist view of laws, and the view of laws as relation...

Nomic realists have traditionally put laws to work within a theory of natural modality, in order to provide a metaphysical source for causal necessitation, counterfactuals, and dispositions. However, laws are well-suited to perform other work as well. Necessitation is a widespread phenomenon and includes cases of categorial, conceptual, grounding, mathematical and normative necessitation. A permissive theory of universals allows us to extend nomic realism into these other domains. With a particular focus on grounding necessitation, it is argued that the sorts (...) of reasons for positing laws in the natural causal domain also apply in other domains. Laws might well be the source of all first-order modality. (shrink)

I’ll argue that one particular argument of Nāgārjuna’s against causation in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā deserves careful consideration from the perspective of contemporary western metaphysics. To show why this is the case, I’ll offer an interpretation of the key passages which differs from at least one popular reading. I’ll then aim to show that a whole swathe of metaphysical views about causation are problematic in light of Nāgārjuna’s argument, so interpreted. I’ll conclude, however, that one contemporary view in metaphysics has the means (...) to respond to this argument: Ontic Structural Realism. (shrink)