I Tensed the Laws and the Laws Won: Non-Eternalist Humeanism

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a variant of a Humean account of laws called "Open Future Humeanism" (OFH), which holds that since the laws supervene partly on future events, there are at any instant infinitely many possible future courses of events. I argue that if one wants to take the openness of the future that OFH proposes ontologically serious, then OFH is best represented within a growing block view of time. I further discuss some of OFH's problems which stem from the fact that in this view, there are no laws as long as time progresses. These problems can be solved by adding a temporal operator to the laws, so that at any instant, we get a set of tensed laws which held up to and including that instant.___________________________________________________________________________________________________

What Price Changing Laws of Nature?

“…Finally, in section 3, we turned to Humeanism and Lewis' 'best system' take on laws of nature. We argued that the only reason why best system laws could be seen as immutable is because the supervenience basis of all these laws has been set up 'by hand' to the whole spatiotemporal extension of the Humean mosaic (in the spirit of making sure that nomic regularities are It has recently been suggested that one way of breaking free of the immutability of BS-laws is to embrace a growing 23 block universe ontology (see for instance Backmann's (2016) 'open-future Humeanism' or Smart's (2018) 'hypertemporal Humeanism'). Even more, the resulting account of changing BS-laws would be 'true[r] to Hume' (Smart 2018, p.109).…”

“…Though they all converge on rejecting (v * ), 'Better Best System Accounts' challenge (i)-(iii), in the spirit of a non-fundamentalist, non-physicalist and antireductionist version of the BSA (Schrenk 2008;Cohen & Callender 2009), whereas varieties of 'open-future Humeanism' tend rather to put (iv) into question (Backmann 2016;Smart 2018). This is true with respect to traditional, synchronic emergence.…”