It is the Business of Laws to Govern

Dialectica 70 (4):577-588 (2016)
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Abstract

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 non-Humean can flatten the bulge. Lawhood serves as a case study of how fundamental posits can do their business.

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Jonathan Schaffer
Rutgers University - New Brunswick

References found in this work

New work for a theory of universals.David K. Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.
Humean Supervenience Debugged.David Lewis - 1994 - Mind 103 (412):473--490.
Laws and Symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 182 (3):327-329.
Laws of nature.Fred I. Dretske - 1977 - Philosophy of Science 44 (2):248-268.
The nature of laws.Michael Tooley - 1977 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (4):667-98.

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