Humean Laws of Nature: The End of the Good Old Days

Abstract

I show how the two great Humean ways of understanding laws of nature, projectivism and systems theory, have unwittingly reprised developments in metaethics over the past century. This demonstration helps us explain and understand trends in both literatures. It also allows work on laws to “leap- frog” over the birth of many new positions, the nomic counterparts of new theories in metaethics. However, like leap-frogging from agriculture to the internet age, it’s hardly clear that we’ve landed in a good place. My reactionary advice is to return to Hume and work on the central insights that motivated Humeanism about modality in the first place. When updated with contemporary insights, there we will find an attractive naturalistic theory of laws, or so I’ll argue, and along the way we’ll see how projectivism and systems theory both get something right about this overall theory.

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Author's Profile

Craig Callender
University of California, San Diego

Citations of this work

Substantive Social Metaphysics.Elanor Taylor - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23:1-18.

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References found in this work

On What Matters: Two-Volume Set.Derek Parfit - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Laws and symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Wise choices, apt feelings: a theory of normative judgment.Allan Gibbard - 1990 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
What is a Law of Nature?D. M. Armstrong - 1983 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Sydney Shoemaker.

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