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How chance explains

Michael Townsen Hicks & Alastair Wilson

Noûs 57 (2):290-315 (2021)

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Primitive Governance.Noga Gratvol - forthcoming - Noûs.details 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. (...) Download Export citation Bookmark
From Multilevel Explanation to Downward Causation.David Yates - 2024 - In Katie Robertson & Alastair Wilson (eds.), Levels of Explanation. Oxford University Press.details The causal closure of the physical poses a familiar causal exclusion problem for the special sciences that stems from the idea that if closure is true, then fundamental physical properties do all the causal work involved in bringing about physical effects. In this paper I aim to show that the strongest causal closure principle that is not ruled out by some simple physics in fact allows for a certain kind of downward causation, which in turn makes room for robust special (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 1 citation
Moral Necessitism and Scientific Contingentism.Harjit Bhogal - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaethics.details Here is a puzzling phenomenon. Moral theories are typically thought to be necessary. If act utilitarianism is true, for example, then it is necessarily true. However, scientific theories are typically thought to be contingent. If quantum field theory is true, it’s not necessarily true — the world could have been Newtonian. My aim is to explore this discrepancy between domains. -/- In particular, I explore the role of what I call `internality’ intuitions in motivating necessitism about both moral and scientific (...) Download Export citation Bookmark
A new circularity in explanations by Humean laws of nature.Marc Lange - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (3):1001-1016.details Humean accounts of natural law have long been charged with being unable to account for the laws’ explanatory power in science. One form of this objection is to charge Humean accounts with explanatory circularity: a fact in the Humean mosaic helps to explain why some regularity is a law (first premise), but that law, in turn, helps to explain why that mosaic fact holds (second premise). To this objection, Humeans have replied that the explanation in the first premise is metaphysical (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 2 citations

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