The Law-Governed Universe

by Roberts, John T.

• ISBN13: 9780199557707
• ISBN10: 0199557705
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780191565311
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780199655939
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

John T. Roberts presents and defends a radically new theory of laws of nature, the Measurability Account. Though consistent with a Humean ontology, Roberts's theory differs sharply from the most influential Humean theory of laws, David Lewis's Best-System Analysis. Unlike other Humean theories, the Measurability Account affirms that there is an important sense in which the laws govern the universe, rather than simply describing it economically. Yet unlike non-Humean theories, it requires only minimal metaphysical commitments. In this way, it combines the advantages of Humean and non-Humean approaches to laws, while avoiding the pitfalls of each. At the heart of the Measurability Account are two new ideas: that lawhood is not a property of facts but rather a role that a proposition can play within a scientific theory, and that what is essential to laws is that they guarantee the reliability of methods of measuring natural quantities. On the basis of these ideas, Roberts argues that we can offer an informative and compelling explanation of why laws have the peculiar counterfactual resilience that sets them apart from accidental uniformities.

Author Biography

John T. Roberts is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

The law-governed world-picture	p. 1
A remarkable idea about the way the universe is	p. 1
Cosmos and compulsion	p. 5
The laws as the cosmic order: the best-system approach	p. 6
The three ways: No-Laws, Non-Governing-Laws, Governing-Laws	p. 10
Work that laws do in science	p. 12
An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order	p. 16
The picture in four theses	p. 24
The strategy of this book	p. 27
The meta-theoretic conception of laws	p. 30
The measurability approach to laws	p. 34
What comes where	p. 43
In defense of some received views	p. 45
Some assumptions that will be in play	p. 45
The laws are propositions	p. 45
The laws are true	p. 48
The logically contingent consequences of the laws are laws themselves	p. 48
At least some laws are metaphysically contingent	p. 56
The meta-theoretic conception of laws	p. 80
Laws of nature, laws of science, laws of theories	p. 80
The first-order conception versus the meta-theoretic conception	p. 90
What is a law of nature?	p. 95
Some examples of meta-theoretic accounts	p. 125
The virtues of the meta-theoretic conception	p. 134
Weighing the virtues and shortcomings of the meta-theoretic conception	p. 137
An epistemological argument for the meta-theoretic conception of laws	p. 142
The Discoverability Thesis, the Governing Thesis, and the first-order conception	p. 142
The main argument	p. 143
The objection from bad company	p. 147
The objection from inference to the best explanation	p. 152
The objection from Bayesianism	p. 158
The objection from contextualist epistemology	p. 165
The objection from the threat of inductive skepticism	p. 167
Conclusion	p. 171
Laws, governing, and counterfactuals	p. 174
Where we are now	p. 174
What would things have to be like in order for the laws of nature to govern the universe?	p. 175
Lawhood, inevitability, counterfactuals	p. 176
What is it for a proposition to be inevitably true?	p. 178
What is it for a whole class of propositions to be inevitably true?	p. 183
What is it for lawhood to confer inevitability?	p. 185
NP and 'supporting counterfactuals'	p. 193
The worry about context-variability	p. 195
A solution, and a look ahead	p. 197
When would the laws have been different?	p. 199
Where we are now	p. 199
The God Cases	p. 200
Other counterexamples to NP	p. 215
A moral-theoretic counterexample to NP	p. 217
Scientific contexts and non-scientific contexts	p. 222
Scientific God Cases?	p. 225
Lewisian non-backtracking counterexamples	p. 228
Where things stand now	p. 242
How could science show that the laws govern?	p. 244
Why the law-governed world-picture must include the Science-Says-So Thesis	p. 244
What is 'extra-scientific'?	p. 246
How can the Science-Says-So Thesis be true?	p. 251
NP as a consequence of the presuppositions in any scientific context	p. 257
NP as true in all possible scientific contexts	p. 261
But how could it be so?	p. 264
Attack of the Actual-Factualists	p. 266
Measurement and counterfactuals	p. 272
Where we are now	p. 272
Measurements, reliability, counterfactuals	p. 274
A general principle that captures the relation between measurement and counterfactuals	p. 283
What we can learn about lawhood from what we have learned about the counterfactual commitments of science	p. 288
A first-order account of laws or a meta-theoretic account of laws?	p. 291
What methods are presupposed to be legitimate measurement procedures?	p. 292
Why we must adopt a meta-theoretic account of laws	p. 313
What lawhood is	p. 323
Where we are now	p. 323
The Measurability Account of laws	p. 323
Brief review of the case for the MAL	p. 325
A note about hedged laws	p. 328
How plausible is the MAL?	p. 329
What if we don't care about the law-governed world-picture?	p. 329
Newton's god and Laplace's demon	p. 343
Beyond Humean and non-Humean	p. 347
Two views of laws	p. 347
Humean Supervenience and the meta-theoretic conception	p. 355
Alleged counterexamples to Humean Supervenience	p. 357
Governing and non-trivial necessity	p. 361
How the MAL lets us have it all	p. 363
Humeanism? Non-Humeanism?	p. 370
What is the significance of the idea of the law-governed universe?	p. 371
Where in the world are the laws of nature?	p. 379
Appendix The MAL in action: A few examples of scientific theories and their laws	p. 381
Newton's theory as a paradigm example	p. 381
Classical special-force laws	p. 387
Geometrical optics and one of its laws	p. 388
Local deterministic field theories	p. 389
References	p. 394
Index	p. 401
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.