Laws and Lawmakers: Science, Metaphysics, and the Laws of Nature

by Marc Lange

Overview

What distinguishes laws of nature from ordinary facts? What are the "lawmakers": the facts in virtue of which the laws are laws? How can laws be necessary, yet contingent? Lange provocatively argues that laws are distinguished by their necessity, which is grounded in primitive subjunctive facts, while also providing a non-technical and accessible survey of the field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199886906
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/09/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
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About the Author

Marc Lange is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Laws Form Counterfactually Stable Sets
1. Welcome
2. Their necessity sets the laws apart
3. The laws's persistence under counterfactuals
4. Nomic preservation
5. Beyond nomic preservation
6. A host of related problems: triviality, circularity, arbitrariness
7. Sub-nomic stability
8. No nonmaximal set containing accidents possesses sub-nomic stability
9. How two sub-nomically stable sets must be related: multiple strata of natural laws
10. Why the laws would still have been laws
11. Conclusion: laws form stable sets
Chapter 2: Natural Necessity
1. Our goal in this chapter
2. The Euthyphro question
3. David Lewis's "Best-System Account"
4. Lewis's account and the laws's supervenience
5. The Euthyphro question returns
6. Are all relative necessities created equal?
7. The modality principle
8. A proposal for distinguishing genuine from merely relative modalities
9. Borrowing a strategy from Chapter 1
10. Necessity as maximal invariance
11. The laws form a system
12. Scientific essentialism squashes the pyramid
13. Why there is a natural ordering of the genuine modalities
14. Conclusion: stability, as maximal invariance, involves necessity
Chapter 4: A World of Subjunctives
1. What if the lawmakers were subjunctive facts?
2. The lawmakers's regress
3. Stability
4. Avoiding adhocery
5. nstantaneous rates of change and the causal explanation problem
6. Et in Arcadia ego
7. The rule of law
8. Why the laws must be complete
9. Envoi: Am I cheating?

Editorial Reviews

"This book presents a compact yet thorough exposition and defense of an important position about the metaphysics of natural laws. The level of philosophical argumentation is consistently high, and while the dialectic gets quite intricate at times, Language more than compensates by writing in a lucid and thoroughly engaging manner. I think it's a must read, for anyone interested in the nature of natural laws." —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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