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  1. The Simplicity of Physical Laws.Eddy Keming Chen - 2025 - Noûs:1–31.
    Physical laws are strikingly simple, yet there is no a priori reason for them to be so. I propose that nomic realists—Humeans and non-Humeans—should recognize simplicity as a fundamental epistemic guide for discovering and evaluating candidate physical laws. This proposal helps resolve several longstanding problems of nomic realism and simplicity. A key consequence is that the presumed epistemic advantage of Humeanism over non-Humeanism dissolves, undermining a prominent epistemological argument for Humeanism. Moreover, simplicity is shown to be more connected to lawhood (...)
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  • Primitive governance.Noga Gratvol - 2025 - Noûs 59 (2):442-463.
    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. (...)
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  • The grounding conception of governance.Ashley Coates - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    According to the governing conception of the laws of nature, laws, in some sense, determine concrete goings-on. Just how to understand the sort of determination at play in governance is, however, a substantial question. One potential answer to this question, which has recently received some attention, is that laws govern by grounding what happens in the concrete world. If this account succeeded, it would show that governance can be understood in terms of an independently motivated and widely accepted notion. Thus (...)
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  • Constraint Accounts of Laws.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2025 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    In recent work, Adlam (2022b), Chen and Goldstein (2022), and Meacham (2023) have defended accounts of laws that take laws to be primitive global constraints. A major advantage of these accounts is that they're able to accommodate the many different kinds of laws that appear in physical theories. In this paper I'll present these three accounts, highlight their distinguishing features, and note some key differences that might lead one to favor one of these accounts over the others. I'll conclude by (...)
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  • (1 other version)Temporal nonlocality from indefinite causal orders.Laurie Letertre - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
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  • Laws of Physics.Eddy Keming Chen - 2024 - Cambridge, United Kingdom : New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
    Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as ontology, possibility, explanation, induction, counterfactuals, time, determinism, and fundamentality. I suggest that laws are fundamental facts that govern the world by constraining its physical possibilities. I examine three hallmarks of laws-simplicity, exactness, and objectivity-and discuss whether and how they may be (...)
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