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  1. The nature of laws.Michael Tooley - 1977 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (4):667-98.
    This paper is concerned with the question of the truth conditions of nomological statements. My fundamental thesis is that it is possible to set out an acceptable, noncircular account of the truth conditions of laws and nomological statements if and only if relations among universals - that is, among properties and relations, construed realistically - are taken as the truth-makers for such statements. My discussion will be restricted to strictly universal, nonstatistical laws. The reason for this limitation is not that (...)
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  • Gravity, Entropy, and Cosmology: in Search of Clarity.David Wallace - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (3):513-540.
    I discuss the statistical mechanics of gravitating systems and in particular its cosmological implications, and argue that many conventional views on this subject in the foundations of statistical mechanics embody significant confusion; I attempt to provide a clearer and more accurate account. In particular, I observe that (i) the role of gravity in entropy calculations must be distinguished from the entropy of gravity, that (ii) although gravitational collapse is entropy-increasing, this is not usually because the collapsing matter itself increases in (...)
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  • Probability in deterministic physics.J. T. Ismael - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy 106 (2):89-108.
    The role of probability is one of the most contested issues in the interpretation of contemporary physics. In this paper, I’ll be reevaluating some widely held assumptions about where and how probabilities arise. Larry Sklar voices the conventional wisdom about probability in classical physics in a piece in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when he writes that “Statistical mechanics was the first foundational physical theory in which probabilistic concepts and probabilistic explanation played a fundamental role.” And the conventional wisdom (...)
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  • Humean Reductionism About Laws of Nature.Ned Hall - 2009
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  • Philosophical Papers Vol. II.David K. Lewis (ed.) - 1986 - Oxford University Press.
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  • A subjectivist’s guide to objective chance.David K. Lewis - 2010 - In Antony Eagle (ed.), Philosophy of Probability: Contemporary Readings. New York: Routledge. pp. 263-293.
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  • What Makes Time Special?Craig Callender - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    As we navigate through life, we model time as flowing, the present as special, and the past as “dead.” This model of time—manifest time—develops in childhood and later thoroughly infiltrates our language, thought, and behavior. It is part of what makes a human life recognizably human. Yet if physics is correct, this model of the world is deeply mistaken. This book is about this conflict between manifest and physical time. The first half dives into the physics and philosophy to establish (...)
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  • Counterfactuals and the Second Law.Barry Loewer - 2007 - In Huw Price & Richard Corry (eds.), Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Laws and Lawmakers Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature.Marc Lange - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Laws form counterfactually stable sets -- Natural necessity -- Three payoffs of my account -- A world of subjunctives.
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  • The Law Governed Universe.John T. Roberts - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    The law-governed world-picture -- A remarkable idea about the way the universe is cosmos and compulsion -- The laws as the cosmic order : the best-system approach -- The three ways : no-laws, non-governing-laws, governing-laws -- Work that laws do in science -- An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order -- The picture in four theses -- The strategy of this book -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The measurability approach to laws -- What (...)
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  • The metaphysics within physics.Tim Maudlin - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    A modest proposal concerning laws, counterfactuals, and explanations - - Why be Humean? -- Suggestions from physics for deep metaphysics -- On the passing of time -- Causation, counterfactuals, and the third factor -- The whole ball of wax -- Epilogue : a remark on the method of metaphysics.
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  • Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics: collected papers on quantum philosophy.John Stewart Bell - 1987 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    This book comprises all of John Bell's published and unpublished papers in the field of quantum mechanics, including two papers that appeared after the first edition was published. It also contains a preface written for the first edition, and an introduction by Alain Aspect that puts into context Bell's great contribution to the quantum philosophy debate. One of the leading expositors and interpreters of modern quantum theory, John Bell played a major role in the development of our current understanding of (...)
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  • Laws in nature.Stephen Mumford - 2004 - New York: Routledge.
    This book outlines a major new theory of natural laws. The book begins with the question of whether there are any genuinely law-like phenomena in nature. The discussion addresses questions currently being debated by metaphysicians such as whether the laws of nature are necessary or contingent and whether a property can be identified independently of its causal role.
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  • Counterfactuals.David K. Lewis - 1973 - Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
    Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.
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  • Time and chance.David Z. Albert - 2000 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the ...
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  • Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and Properties.Alexander Bird - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Professional philosophers and advanced students working in metaphysics and the philosophy of science will find this book both provocative and stimulating.
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  • Nature's capacities and their measurement.Nancy Cartwright - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Ever since David Hume, empiricists have barred powers and capacities from nature. In this book Cartwright argues that capacities are essential in our scientific world, and, contrary to empiricist orthodoxy, that they can meet sufficiently strict demands for testability. Econometrics is one discipline where probabilities are used to measure causal capacities, and the technology of modern physics provides several examples of testing capacities (such as lasers). Cartwright concludes by applying the lessons of the book about capacities and probabilities to the (...)
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  • What is a Law of Nature?D. M. Armstrong - 1983 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Sydney Shoemaker.
    This is a study of a crucial and controversial topic in metaphysics and the philosophy of science: the status of the laws of nature. D. M. Armstrong works out clearly and in comprehensive detail a largely original view that laws are relations between properties or universals. The theory is continuous with the views on universals and more generally with the scientific realism that Professor Armstrong has advanced in earlier publications. He begins here by mounting an attack on the orthodox and (...)
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  • How the laws of physics lie.Nancy Cartwright - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.
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  • Plato.Richard Kraut - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Causal determinism.Carl Hoefer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Collapse theories.Giancarlo Ghirardi - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Quantum mechanics, with its revolutionary implications, has posed innumerable problems to philosophers of science. In particular, it has suggested reconsidering basic concepts such as the existence of a world that is, at least to some extent, independent of the observer, the possibility of getting reliable and objective knowledge about it, and the possibility of taking (under appropriate circumstances) certain properties to be objectively possessed by physical systems. It has also raised many others questions which are well known to those involved (...)
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  • Bohmian mechanics.Sheldon Goldstein - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Bohmian mechanics, which is also called the de Broglie-Bohm theory, the pilot-wave model, and the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, is a version of quantum theory discovered by Louis de Broglie in 1927 and rediscovered by David Bohm in 1952. It is the simplest example of what is often called a hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Bohmian mechanics a system of particles is described in part by its wave function, evolving, as usual, according to Schrödinger's equation. However, the (...)
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  • Causally symmetric Bohm model.Roderick Ian Sutherland - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 39 (4):782-805.
    The aim of this paper is to construct a version of Bohm’s model that also includes the existence of backwards-in-time influences in addition to the usual forwards causation. The motivation for this extension is to remove the need in the existing model for a preferred reference frame. As is well known, Bohm’s explanation for the nonlocality of Bell’s theorem necessarily involves instantaneous changes being produced at space-like separations, in conflict with the “spirit” of special relativity even though these changes are (...)
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  • Measures, explanations and the past: Should ‘special’ initial conditions be explained?Craig Callender - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2):195-217.
    For the generalizations of thermodynamics to obtain, it appears that a very ‘special’ initial condition of the universe is required. Is this initial condition itself in need of explanation? I argue that it is not. In so doing, I offer a framework in which to think about ‘special’ initial conditions in all areas of science, though I concentrate on the case of thermodynamics. I urge the view that it is not always a serious mark against a theory that it must (...)
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  • The distribution postulate in Bohm's theory.Jeffrey A. Barrett - 1995 - Topoi 14 (1):45-54.
    On Bohm''s formulation of quantum mechanics particles always have determinate positions and follow continuous trajectories. Bohm''s theory, however, requires a postulate that says that particles are initially distributed in a special way: particles are randomly distributed so that the probability of their positions being represented by a point in any regionR in configuration space is equal to the square of the wave-function integrated overR. If the distribution postulate were false, then the theory would generally fail to make the right statistical (...)
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  • Scientific explanation.James Woodward - 1979 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (1):41-67.
    Issues concerning scientific explanation have been a focus of philosophical attention from Pre- Socratic times through the modern period. However, recent discussion really begins with the development of the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model. This model has had many advocates (including Popper 1935, 1959, Braithwaite 1953, Gardiner, 1959, Nagel 1961) but unquestionably the most detailed and influential statement is due to Carl Hempel (Hempel 1942, 1965, and Hempel & Oppenheim 1948). These papers and the reaction to them have structured subsequent discussion concerning (...)
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  • The Hole Argument.John D. Norton - 1988 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988:56 - 64.
    I give an informal outline of the hole argument which shows that spacetime substantivalism leads to an undesirable indeterminism in a broad class of spacetime theories. This form of the argument depends on the selection of differentiable manifolds within a spacetime theory as representing spacetime. I consider the conditions under which the argument can be extended to address versions of spacetime substantivalism which select these differentiable manifolds plus some further structure to represent spacetime. Finally, I respond to the criticisms of (...)
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  • Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow.David Lewis - 1979 - Noûs 13 (4):455-476.
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  • Laws and their stability.Marc Lange - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):415Ð432.
    Many philosophers have believed that the laws of nature differ from the accidental truths in their invariance under counterfactual perturbations. Roughly speaking, the laws would still have held had q been the case, for any q that is consistent with the laws. (Trivially, no accident would still have held under every such counterfactual supposition.) The main problem with this slogan (even if it is true) is that it uses the laws themselves to delimit qs range. I present a means of (...)
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  • Laws, counterfactuals, stability, and degrees of lawhood.Marc Lange - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (2):243-267.
    I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not "broader"--at least in the most straightforward sense.) The stability distinctive of the laws is used to explicate what it would mean for there (...)
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  • The entropy theory of counterfactuals.Douglas N. Kutach - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (1):82-104.
    I assess the thesis that counterfactual asymmetries are explained by an asymmetry of the global entropy at the temporal boundaries of the universe, by developing a method of evaluating counterfactuals that includes, as a background assumption, the low entropy of the early universe. The resulting theory attempts to vindicate the common practice of holding the past mostly fixed under counterfactual supposition while at the same time allowing the counterfactual's antecedent to obtain by a natural physical development. Although the theory has (...)
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  • Infinitesimal chances and the laws of nature.Adam Elga - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):67 – 76.
    The 'best-system' analysis of lawhood [Lewis 1994] faces the 'zero-fit problem': that many systems of laws say that the chance of history going actually as it goes--the degree to which the theory 'fits' the actual course of history--is zero. Neither an appeal to infinitesimal probabilities nor a patch using standard measure theory avoids the difficulty. But there is a way to avoid it: replace the notion of 'fit' with the notion of a world being typical with respect to a theory.
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  • Laws of nature.Fred I. Dretske - 1977 - Philosophy of Science 44 (2):248-268.
    It is a traditional empiricist doctrine that natural laws are universal truths. In order to overcome the obvious difficulties with this equation most empiricists qualify it by proposing to equate laws with universal truths that play a certain role, or have a certain function, within the larger scientific enterprise. This view is examined in detail and rejected; it fails to account for a variety of features that laws are acknowledged to have. An alternative view is advanced in which laws are (...)
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  • New work for a theory of universals.David K. Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.
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  • Sorites Paradox.Dominic Hyde & Diana Raffman - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Vagueness.Roy Sorensen - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics.Roger Penrose - 1999 - Oxford University Press.
    In his bestselling work of popular science, Sir Roger Penrose takes us on a fascinating roller-coaster ride through the basic principles of physics, cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy to show that human thinking can never be emulated by a machine.
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  • Contact with the Nomic: A Challenge for Deniers of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature Part II: the Epistemological Argument for Humean Supervenience.John Earman & John T. Roberts - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2):253-286.
    In Part I, we presented and motivated a new formulation of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). Here in Part II, we present an epistemological argument in defense of HS, thus formulated. Our contention is that one can combine a modest realism about laws of nature with a proper recognition of the importance of empirical testability in the epistemology of science only if one accepts HS.
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  • Part 1: Theoretical equivalence in physics.James Owen Weatherall - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (5):e12592.
    I review the philosophical literature on the question of when two physical theories are equivalent. This includes a discussion of empirical equivalence, which is often taken to be necessary, and sometimes taken to be sufficient, for theoretical equivalence; and “interpretational” equivalence, which is the idea that two theories are equivalent just in case they have the same interpretation. It also includes a discussion of several formal notions of equivalence that have been considered in the recent philosophical literature, including (generalized) definitional (...)
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  • Part 2: Theoretical equivalence in physics.James Owen Weatherall - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (5):e12591.
    I review the philosophical literature on the question of when two physical theories are equivalent. This includes a discussion of empirical equivalence, which is often taken to be necessary, and sometimes taken to be sufficient, for theoretical equivalence; and “interpretational” equivalence, which is the idea that two theories are equivalent just in case they have the same interpretation. It also includes a discussion of several formal notions of equivalence that have been considered in the recent philosophical literature, including (generalized) definitional (...)
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  • It is the Business of Laws to Govern.Jonathan Schaffer - 2016 - Dialectica 70 (4):577-588.
    Non-Humean accounts of lawhood are said to founder on the Inference Problem, which is the problem of saying how laws that go beyond the regularities can entail the regularities. I argue that the Inference Problem has a simple solution – the Axiomatic Solution – on which the non-Humean only needs to outfit her laws with a law-to-regularity axiom. There is a remaining Epistemic Bulge, as to why one should believe that the posit-so-axiomatized is to be found in nature, but the (...)
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  • The Past Hypothesis and the Nature of Physical Laws.Eddy Keming Chen - 2023 - In Barry Loewer, Brad Weslake & Eric B. Winsberg (eds.), The Probability Map of the Universe: Essays on David Albert’s _time and Chance_. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 204-248.
    If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and time-dependent (...)
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  • Quantum Entanglement, Bohmian Mechanics, and Humean Supervenience.Elizabeth Miller - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3):567-583.
    David Lewis is a natural target for those who believe that findings in quantum physics threaten the tenability of traditional metaphysical reductionism. Such philosophers point to allegedly holistic entities they take both to be the subjects of some claims of quantum mechanics and to be incompatible with Lewisian metaphysics. According to one popular argument, the non-separability argument from quantum entanglement, any realist interpretation of quantum theory is straightforwardly inconsistent with the reductive conviction that the complete physical state of the world (...)
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  • Can we know the global structure of spacetime?John Byron Manchak - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 40 (1):53-56.
    Here, we briefly review the notion of observational indistinguishability within the context of classical general relativity. We settle a conjecture given by Malament (1977) concerning the subject and then strengthen the result considerably. The upshot is this: There seems to be a robust sense in which the global structure of every cosmological model is underdetermined.
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  • The package deal account of laws and properties.Barry Loewer - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1065-1089.
    This paper develops an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws I call “the Package Deal Account ” that is a descendent of Lewis’ BSA but differs from it in a number of significant ways. It also rejects some elements of the metaphysics in which Lewis develops his BSA. First, Lewis proposed a metaphysical thesis about fundamental properties he calls “Humean Supervenience” according to which all fundamental properties are instantiated by points or point sized individuals and the only fundamental relations (...)
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  • Two accounts of laws and time.Barry Loewer - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):115-137.
    Among the most important questions in the metaphysics of science are "What are the natures of fundamental laws and chances?" and "What grounds the direction of time?" My aim in this paper is to examine some connections between these questions, discuss two approaches to answering them and argue in favor of one. Along the way I will raise and comment on a number of issues concerning the relationship between physics and metaphysics and consequences for the subject matter and methodology of (...)
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  • Making best systems best for us.Christian Loew & Siegfried Jaag - 2018 - Synthese 197 (6):2525-2550.
    Humean reductionism about laws of nature appears to leave a central aspect of scientific practice unmotivated: If the world’s fundamental structure is exhausted by the actual distribution of non-modal properties and the laws of nature are merely efficient summaries of this distribution, then why does science posit laws that cover a wide range of non-actual circumstances? In this paper, we develop a new version of the Humean best systems account of laws based on the idea that laws need to organize (...)
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  • Determinism and Chance.Barry Loewer - 2001 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 32 (4):609-620.
    It is generally thought that objective chances for particular events different from 1 and 0 and determinism are incompatible. However, there are important scientific theories whose laws are deterministic but which also assign non-trivial probabilities to events. The most important of these is statistical mechanics whose probabilities are essential to the explanations of thermodynamic phenomena. These probabilities are often construed as 'ignorance' probabilities representing our lack of knowledge concerning the microstate. I argue that this construal is incompatible with the role (...)
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  • Concepts without boundaries.R. M. Sainsbury - 1996 - In Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader. MIT Press. pp. 186-205.
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