This paper is an attempt to further our understanding of mechanisms conceived of as ontologically separable from laws. What opportunities are there for a mechanistic perspective to be independent of, or even more fundamental than, a law perspective? Advocates of the mechanistic view often play with the possibility of internal and external reliability, or with the paralleling possibilities of enforcing, counteracting, redirecting, etc., the mechanisms’ power to produce To further this discussion I adopt a trope ontology. It is independent of (...) the notion of law, and can easily be adapted to account for such characteristics of mechanisms. The idea of tropes as mechanisms is worked out in some detail. According to the resulting picture, there is still an opportunity to link mechanisms and laws. But while the predominant law view conceives of mechanistic approaches as special kinds of law accounts, this study indicates that the converse may be true. Law accounts are special cases of mechanistic accounts, and they work only in those worlds where the mechanisms are of the right kind. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Lewis’ ‘Humean Supervenience Debugged’ . Lewis was in the business of defending Humean Supervenience, and the project seemed successful until the case of chance. Lewis thus originally named chance the ‘big bad bug’ for Humean Supervenience until the aforementioned paper in which he claims victory. Here I argue that he was unsuccessful and that Humean Supervenience remains bugged by chance. I will show how this bug remains due to a misdiagnosis of where the problem (...) lies with regard to undermining. First, I define Humean Supervenience and chance, and state the bug in its original form, then secondly I describe Lewis’ attempt to remove the bug. Thirdly, I explain why the bug persists, despite Lewis’ efforts, and show the real source of the undermining problem to be due to the circularity of Humean Supervenient style accounts of chance. Finally I describe the situation this leaves chance in, and show how the incompatibility of chance and Humean Supervenience is evidence for the nonexistence of chance. I conclude that it is the circularity of the formation of Humean Supervenient laws of chance which continue to bug Humean Supervenience, leaving it untenable and resulting in little chance for chance. (shrink)

I sketch a new constraint on chance, which connects chance ascriptions closely with ascriptions of ability, and more specifically with 'CAN'-claims. This connection between chance and ability has some claim to be a platitude; moreover, it exposes the debate over deterministic chance to the extensive literature on (in)compatibilism about free will. The upshot is that a prima facie case for the tenability of deterministic chance can be made. But the main thrust of the paper is to draw attention to the (...) connection between the truth conditions of sentences involving 'CAN' and 'CHANCE', and argue for the context sensitivity of each term. Awareness of this context sensitivity has consequences for the evaluation of particular philosophical arguments for (in) compatibilism when they are presented in particular contexts. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between objective chance and the randomness of a sequence of outcomes. Discussion is focussed around the claim that something happens by chance iff it is random. This claim is subject to many objections. Attempts to save it by providing alternative theories of chance and randomness, involving indeterminism, unpredictability, and reductionism about chance, are canvassed. The article is largely expository, with particular attention being paid to the details of algorithmic randomness, a topic relatively unfamiliar to philosophers.

This thesis advances and defends a novel two-category ontology of objects and dimensions, latterly conceived as respects of comparability. The proposed 'dimensionist' ontology is set out and brought to bear on discussions of determinables and determinates, the problem of universals, fact ontologies, and nomic governance. Dimensionism is argued to fare well in comparison to a range of rival ontological accounts of property possession. A metametaphysical framework is set out to undergird the discussion, which draws on both realist and pragmatist resources.

A ‘might’ counterfactual is a sentence of the form ‘If it had been the case that A, it might have been the case that C’. Recently, John Hawthorne has argued that the truth of many ‘might’ counterfactuals precludes the truth of most ‘would’ counterfactuals. I examine the semantics of ‘might’ counterfactuals, with one eye towards defusing this argument, but mostly with the aim of understanding this interesting class of sentences better.