Humeanism about laws of nature—the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic—is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection, and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for Humeanism. However, these objections share a guiding thought—they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical picture suggested by Humeanism. I suggest that the Humean should respond to these objections not by rejecting this divergence, but by arguing that it is appropriate. The Humean should distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanation. And they should leverage this into distinctions between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality and scientific and metaphysical possibility. We can use these distinctions to respond to the objections that the Humean faces.
Humeanism about laws of nature is, roughly, the view that the laws of nature are just patterns, or ways of describing patterns, in the mosaic of events. In this paper, I survey some of the (many!) objections that have been raised to Humeanism, considering how the Humean might respond. And I consider how we might make a positive case for Humeanism. The common thread running through all this is that the viability of the Humean view relies on the Humean having an importantly different conception of explanation to the anti‐Humean.
The Humean typically appeals to some variant of the Best Systems Account (BSA). Very roughly, the BSA says that the laws of nature are the propositions that best balance simplicity and informativeness. A problem, however: consider the property F which applies to all and only the things in the actual world. Then it seems like the proposition, everything is F, would be very informative, and very simple. But clearly it is not one of the laws. In response, Barry Loewer has suggested a way to identify a special set of properties—he claims that the natural properties can be defined up along with the laws. We can, he thinks, adapt the BSA so that it doesn’t just output the laws; it also outputs the natural properties at the same time. Loewer calls this the Package Deal Account (PDA). However, the PDA hasn’t been developed in detail. This chapter aims to rectify this, developing and discussing the PDA in a way that it hasn’t been before.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.