Are Causal Laws Contingent?
Abstract
It has been nearly a decade and a half since Fred Dretske, David Armstrong and Michael Tooley, having each rejected the Regularity theory,
independently proposed that natural laws are grounded in a second-order
relation that somehow binds together universals.' (l shall call this the
‘DTA theory’). In this way they sought to overcome the major - and
notorious — shortcomings of every version of the Regularity theory: how
to provide truth conditions for laws that lack instances; how to distinguish laws from accidental generalizations; how to provide truth conditions for the counterfactuals and disposition statements that laws apparently ‘support’; how to justify inductive inferences from past events to
laws and future events. For each of these puzzles, an apparently key element in the solution seems to be missing from Regularity theories. That
missing element is a genuine connection, a relation with more than merely
spatial and/or temporal content, linking the antecedent of a law to its
consequent. Once such an additional objective element - however understood — is admitted to be essential to the analysis of laws, one is forced
to give up the idea that the logical form of laws can be given in terms of
quantifiers ranging over events or states of alfairs, and truth-functions.