Abstract

This book adds to a realist account of laws of nature the framework for a related realist understanding of causation. It has two main parts: the first is concerned with laws, the second with causation. In the first main part, Tooley surveys sophisticated regularity accounts of laws and argues that none is successful. One of his central themes is that regularity accounts fail to meet the intuition that there can be underived laws which lack relevant instances--an intuition which Tooley supports by appeal to two crucial examples. Tooley's diagnosis is that the reductionist assumption that the truth-makers for laws of nature are facts about particulars must be abandoned, and that laws must therefore be facts about universals. What kinds of facts? Tooley sets out a careful specification of the theoretical concept of a nomological relation. But he grants a need to go beyond this in order to make his account illuminating: Just how much has been explicated by the claim that what makes it a law that whatever has property P also has property Q is that the universals P and Q stand in a certain "nomic" relation? To answer this, and to dispel other doubts, Tooley offers the speculative suggestion that for it to be a law that whatever is P is also Q is for the conjunctive universal P-and-Q to exist, and for the universal P to exist, but only "dependently," as part of the conjunctive universal P-and-Q. Tooley argues that his specification of nomic relations can be extended to cover the case of probabilistic laws. It is unclear, however, how his speculative metaphysics could be extended to cover the probabilistic case: Can the universal P exist only to some degree as part of the conjunctive universal P-and-Q, and at the same time to another degree as part of the universal P-and-R?