Abstract

In his essay ‘Laws and States in Quantum Mechanics’, John Forge presents a case for considering laws of nature to be privileged sets of states, trajectories in the quantum mechanical analogue of phase space. Having presented an argument to show that states have to be taken with full ontological seriousness, Forge then uses those states to undergird his favourite account of laws and explanation — called the Instance View. On this view laws are a special sort of pattern, a certain kind of regularity, and explanations are instances of these regularities (so that you explain some phenomenon A by indicating that it is an instance of some regularity R). Forge then uses this account of laws and explanation to urge the acceptance of van Fraassen’s Modal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.