Abstract
Humeans take reality to be devoid of ‘necessary connections’: things just happen. Laws of nature are to be understood in terms of what ‘just happens’, not vice versa. Here the Humean needs some conception of what it is that ‘just happens’ – a conception of the Humean mosaic. Lewis’s Humeanism incorporates such a conception in the form of a Lewis-style metaphysics of objects, properties, and modality. Newer versions of Humeanism about laws of nature, such as the Better Best Systems approach (BBS), typically reject such a Lewisian metaphysics, but it remains unclear what they can offer in its place. By exploring different candidate conceptions, this paper sheds light on the limits of Humeanism about laws of nature: not all conceptions of the Humean mosaic form a suitable basis for a Humean theory of laws. In fact, only a metaphysics roughly in line with Lewis’s will do. The paper ends with a tentative generalization of this result, thus pointing to the ‘limit’ of Humeanism in general: taking the Humean way of thinking to its limit results in a rejection of the whole idea of such a mosaic – and hence of Humean mosaic-based accounts of anything.
Highlights
Humeans take reality to be devoid of ‘necessary connections’: things just happen
Newer versions of Humeanism about laws of nature, such as the Better Best Systems approach (BBS), typically reject such a Lewisian metaphysics, but it remains unclear what they can offer in its place
By exploring different candidate conceptions, this paper sheds light on the limits of Humeanism about laws of nature: not all conceptions of the Humean mosaic form a suitable basis for a Humean theory of laws
Summary
The Humean approach to laws of nature attempts to account for laws using materials Hume would find acceptable – viz., a Humean mosaic. As Lewis observes, it is not even required, on the Best Systems approach, to restrict the laws to general truths: if it improves the overall balance of strength and simplicity, a truth about particular aspects of the entire mosaic may be regarded as a law as well.. The (predicate-logical) language on which the Best Systems competition is to be based should include primitive predicate symbols for just the ‘perfectly natural properties’; contrived ones (like our P) are not allowed In this way, the Best Systems theory avoids the allegedly impossible task of having to compare the balance of simplicity and strength for systems couched in different vocabularies.. It is thought that this amendment to the Best Systems approach makes room for autonomous special sciences.
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