Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of philosophers have come to doubt the viability of the empiricist program of analyzing the concepts of lawhood and causation in terms of nonnomic or noncausal concepts. The central thesis of Carroll's book is that these concepts cannot be so analyzed. Carroll is quite liberal about what he is willing to count as a reductive analysis. He does not identify an analysis with a definition, as traditional empiricists have insisted upon. He is willing to go along with contemporary empiricists who are satisfied that they have an analysis if they can identify necessary conditions or even just a supervenience base. Moreover, he is willing to include concepts with nomic and causal commitments in the supervenience base. Thus Carroll intends his conclusions to encompass all empiricist attempts, no matter how weak, to analyze the concepts of lawhood and causation.