Abstract

Kevin Davey claims that the justification of the second law of thermodynamics as it is conveyed by the “standard story” of statistical mechanics, roughly speaking, that lowentropy microstates tend to evolve to high-entropy microstates, is “unhelpful at best and wrong at worst.” In reply, I demonstrate that Davey’s argument for rejecting the standard story commits him to a form of skepticism that is more radical than the position he claims to be stating and that Davey places unreasonable demands on the notion of justification in the physical sciences.