I Tensed the Laws and the Laws Won: Non-Eternalist Humeanism

Manuscrito 39 (4):255-277 (2016)
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Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I propose a variant of a Humean account of laws called "Open Future Humeanism", which holds that since the laws supervene partly on future events, there are at any instant infinitely many possible future courses of events. I argue that if one wants to take the openness of the future that OFH proposes ontologically serious, then OFH is best represented within a growing block view of time. I further discuss some of OFH's problems which stem from the fact that in this view, there are no laws as long as time progresses. These problems can be solved by adding a temporal operator to the laws, so that at any instant, we get a set of tensed laws which held up to and including that instant.

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Marius Backmann
University of Konstanz

Citations of this work

Metaphysics of laws and ontology of time.Cord Friebe - 2018 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 33 (1):77-89.
What Price Changing Laws of Nature?Olivier Sartenaer, Alexandre Guay & Paul Humphreys - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-19.

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References found in this work

A Theory of Conditionals.Robert Stalnaker - 1968 - In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Studies in Logical Theory. Oxford,: Blackwell. pp. 98-112.
Humean Supervenience Debugged.David Lewis - 1994 - Mind 103 (412):473--490.
How do we know it is now now?David Braddon-Mitchell - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):199–203.
The dispositionalist conception of laws.Alexander Bird - 2005 - Foundations of Science 10 (4):353-70.

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