Causes and Laws

Abstract

Our object in this paper is to show how causes and laws of nature are related. Contemporary scientific commonsense finds little problem here. If one token event (state, or whatever are taken to be causal relata) is taken to cause another, then it is assumed that, in general at least, this pair of tokens instantiates a law. The law may be probabilistic (statistical) only. The present state of scientific inquiry suggests that the fundamental laws that govern causal processes may be no more than probabilistic. But, barring controversial cases involving such things as free will and miracles, it is assumed that a law is always involved. Contemporary philosophy of science also finds little problem in the relation of cause and law. This is because it is orthodoxy, although now perhaps an orthodoxy on the defensive, that tokencausation is ontologically no more than the instantiation of a regularity in the behaviour of things, and equally that a law is ontologically no more than a regularity in the behaviour of things. Given this general approach, which can be and has been sophisticated in various ways, cause and law come naturally together. Because tokencausation instantiates a regularity, it automatically instantiates a law. It is not necessary to hold that each instantiation of a law is a case of causation. The causal laws might merely be a sub-species of the regularities that are laws, without contravening the spirit of a Regularity theory of causation and a Regularity theory of laws. We, however, reject both the Regularity theory of causation and the Regularity theory of laws. Once this is done, the relation between causes and laws becomes more problematic.