Abstract
A long-standing charge of circularity against regularity accounts of laws has recently seen a surge of renewed interest. The difficulty is that we appeal to laws to explain their worldly instances, but if these laws are descriptions of regularities in the instances then they are explained by those very instances. By the transitivity of explanation, we reach an absurd conclusion: instances of the laws explain themselves. While drawing a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations merely modifies the challenge rather than resolving it, I argue that it does point us towards an attractive solution. According to Humeanism, the most prominent form of the regularity view, laws capture information about important patterns in the phenomena. By invoking laws in scientific explanations, Humeans are showing how a given explanandum is subsumed into a more general pattern. Doing so both undermines a principle of transitivity that plays a crucial role in the circularity argument and draws out a central feature of the Humean approach to scientific explanation.
Highlights
One of the most influential accounts of laws of nature is the regularity account, which takes the laws to be descriptions of regularities that occur in the world
The Humean approach to laws has long been subject to the criticism that the laws it offers fail to back the sorts of explanation that we standardly take laws to be involved in
The aim of this paper is to identify a crucial feature of Humean laws that underwrites their ability to support the explanations we find in both folk and scientific practice
Summary
One of the most influential accounts of laws of nature is the regularity account, which takes the laws to be descriptions of regularities that occur in the world. Since the resulting explanations do not support a principle of transitivity crucial to the circularity objection, I claim that this feature is one which all successful Humean responses to the challenge ought to share in By focusing on this commonality in Humean accounts rather than the specifics of one in particular, it is hoped that this defence will be compatible with a range of pre-existing commitments.. It requires the laws appealed to by an explanation to play a non-Humean role: they must be responsible for the mosaic’s being the way that it is As there is another sense of explanation available, one based on identifying events as instances of a broader pattern, Humeans are free to reject the one present in the circularity argument. Explanations have pattern subsumption as a central characteristic and this feature undermines the transitivity principle that the circularity argument depends upon.
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