Humean Laws in an unHumean World

Kimpton‐Nye, Samuel

doi:10.1017/apa.2017.19

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…As mentioned in Sect. 3.2, the dispositional-BSA account of laws (Demarest 2017;Kimpton-Nye 2017) still wants the laws/regularities to be metaphysically explained by properties, which it achieves by maintaining that properties metaphysically explain their distributions which, in turn, metaphysically explain the BSA-laws. But what the Barker-Smart problem shows is that structuralism about properties precludes those properties from explaining regularities in property distributions, and if properties cannot metaphysically explain their own distributions, they cannot explain the BSA laws.…”

Section: Laws As Regularities?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist Canon

Kimpton‐Nye

2021

Philos Stud

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Dispositional Essentialism is a unified anti-Humean account of the metaphysics of low-level physical properties and laws of nature. In this paper, I articulate the view that I label Canonical Dispositional Essentialism (CDE), which comprises a structuralist metaphysics of properties and an account of laws as relations in the property structure. I then present an alternative anti-Humean account of properties and laws (still somewhat in the dispositional essentialist spirit). This account rejects CDE’s structuralist metaphysics of properties in favour of a view of properties as qualitative grounds of dispositions and it rejects CDE’s view of laws as relations in favour of a view of laws as features of an efficient description of possible property distributions. I then defend this view over CDE on the grounds that it can overcome an explanatory shortcoming of CDE and that it achieves a level of continuity with science that CDE fails to achieve. The upshot of this paper is a significant narrowing of the range of possibilities in which the absolutely best unified account of laws and properties resides.

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Section: Laws As Regularities?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist Canon

Kimpton‐Nye

2021

Philos Stud

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“…One option would simply be to identify the laws with the relevant dispositional essentialist truths. Alternatively, they might identify the laws with certain universal generalizations that (roughly) reflect the relevant essentialist truths (Bird 2007 ), or with generalizations that provide the best systematization of the fundamental property distributions in either the actual or in all possible worlds (Demarest 2017 ; Kimpton-Nye 2017 ; Williams 2019 ). Or they might even choose to dispense with laws all together (Mumford 1998 ).…”

Section: Standard Reified Dispositional Essentialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nominalist dispositional essentialism

Vogt

2022

Synthese

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Dispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the aim of this paper is to explore a nominalist version of the view, Austere Nominalist Dispositional Essentialism. The core features of the proposed account are that it eschews all kinds of properties (be they universals, tropes, or sets of particulars), takes certain predicative truths as fundamental, and employs the so-called generic notion of essence. As I will argue, the account is significantly closer to the core idea behind Dispositional Essentialism than the only nominalist account in the vicinity of Dispositional Essentialism that has been offered so far—Ann Whittle’s (2009) Causal Nominalism—and is immune to crucial problems that affect this view.

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“…The Powers-BSA (Demarest, 2017;Kimpton-Nye, 2017, 2021Williams, 2019, sec. 10.1) is an alternative to Bird's canonical account of the relationship between laws and powers.…”

Section: Powers-bsamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It thus shows how powers theorists can avoid ad hoc explanations and resist an inflated ontology of powers and governing laws. The key is to understand laws not as flowing from the essences of powers, as per Bird ( 2007), but as features of a description of how powers are possibly distributed, as per Demarest (2017), Kimpton-Nye (2017, 2021 and Williams (2019); call this the Powers-BSA. This underappreciated powers-based account of laws is continuous with actual scientific practice and thereby quite naturally accommodates functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries.…”

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confidence: 99%

How to be a powers theorist about functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries

Kimpton‐Nye

2022

Philos Stud

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This paper defends an account of the laws of nature in terms of irreducibly modal properties (aka powers) from the threat posed by functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries. It thus shows how powers theorists can avoid ad hoc explanations and resist an inflated ontology of powers and governing laws. The key is to understand laws not as flowing from the essences of powers, as per Bird (2007), but as features of a description of how powers are possibly distributed, as per Demarest (2017), Kimpton-Nye (2017, 2021) and Williams (2019); call this the Powers-BSA. This underappreciated powers-based account of laws is continuous with actual scientific practice and thereby quite naturally accommodates functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries. This paper thus positions the Powers-BSA as the leading anti-Humean account of the relationship between laws and properties.

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Humean Laws in an unHumean World

Cited by 19 publications

References 16 publications

Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist Canon

Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist Canon

Nominalist dispositional essentialism

How to be a powers theorist about functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries

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