Regularities, Degrees of Necessity, and Dispositionalism

Abstract

Traditionally, philosophers have cashed out the distinction between law-like and accidental regularities sharply: a regularity is either law-like, and thereby necessary, or accidental. However, Mitchell (2000) and Lange (2008) have drawn attention to the fact that some law-like regularities come in different degrees of necessity. For instance, the regularity expressed by “all electrons are negatively charged” has a greater degree of necessity than the one expressed by “all mammals are warm-blooded”, even if both of them are true. Moreover, Mitchell argues that the dichotomy between accidental and necessary regularities is unable to capture the complexity of the causal structure of the world. Building on this, I argue that regularities do not only come in different degrees of necessity, but also have different formal features (domain scope, generality, etc.) and ontological features (they have different ontological grounds). All these features matter in order to make sense of the causal complexity of the world. Accordingly, I propose a new conceptual framework to analyze regularities according to three mutually independent levels of analysis: formal features, degree of necessity, and ontological grounds. This new framework can make sense of different degrees of necessity, and it naturally accommodates a wide variety of scientifically-relevant regularities including those typically associated with laws of nature, biological mechanisms, and dispositional properties.