Questions about the historical origins and development of claims that nature is lawlike are generally treated as entirely (. On the other hand there are schools of philosophy that seek to justify ethics generally, or legal theory specifically, in conceptions of nature. On the one hand, we frequently talk of nature as being lawlike or as obeying laws. The relationship between conceptions of law and conceptions of nature is a complex one, and proceeds on what appear to be two distinct fronts. I begin by reviewing Lewis’ account of perfectly natural properties and his Humean BSA of laws. In sum, the PDA goes further in explicating the notion of laws in terms of the aims and practices of science especially fundamental physics rather than in terms of prior metaphysics. By doing so it responds to some epistemological and metaphysical issues that have been raised regarding natural properties and their role in the BSA. It replaces Lewis’ account with an account on which natural properties are not metaphysically prior to the laws but are elements of a package that includes a fundamental arena that plays the role of space-time as well as fundamental laws and properties. Fourth and most importantly, unlike Lewis’ BSA, the PDA does not presuppose metaphysically primitive elite properties/quantities that Lewis calls “perfectly natural” properties/quantities or presuppose a metaphysically preferred language whose terms denote such properties/quantities. ![]() Third, the PDA expands and develops the criteria for what counts in favor of a candidate system with more attention to the criteria employed by physicists in evaluating proposed theories. In contrast, the PDA allows for the possibility that fundamental properties are individuated in terms of laws and so are not categorical. Second, although Lewis’ BSA doesn’t require HS his Humeanism does require that fundamental properties are categorical. In contrast, the PDA is not committed to HS or even to the fundamental arena in which fundamental properties are instantiated possessing geometrical structure and thus is able to accommodate relations and structures found in contemporary physics that apparently conflict with HS. While the BSA does not require HS Lewis seems to hope that it is true. ) are geometrical spatial and temporal relations between these. First, Lewis proposed a metaphysical thesis about fundamental properties he calls “Humean Supervenience” according to which all fundamental properties are instantiated by points or point sized individuals and the only fundamental relations (. It also rejects some elements of the metaphysics in which Lewis develops his BSA. This paper develops an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws I call “the Package Deal Account ” that is a descendent of Lewis’ BSA but differs from it in a number of significant ways. For these reasons, we conclude that the scientific realist must embrace natural necessity. In addition, Humeanism fails to be naturalistically motivated. ![]() We specifically identify three major problems for the best-systems account of lawhood: its central concept of strength cannot be formulated non-circularly, it cannot offer a satisfactory account of the laws of the special sciences, and it can offer no explanation of the success of inductive inference. ) is compatible with Humeanism about the laws of nature, and we conclude that it is not. But what does the scientific realist’s commitment to physical modality require? We consider whether scientific realism (. If we are committed to the content of our best scientific theories, we must accept the modal nature of the physical world. ![]() Causality, equilibrium, laws of nature, and probability all feature prominently in scientific theory and explanation, and each one is a modal notion. There is good reason to believe that scientific realism requires a commitment to the objective modal structure of the physical world.
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