Nomothetic Explanation and Humeanism about Laws of Nature

Abstract

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.

Humean Idealism

“…It is about Humean idealism qua Humeanism. And it is a complaint that Humeans vigorously resist [Loewer 2012;Bhogal forthcoming]. Since I am investigating a purportedly deadly argument against idealism, and the objection at hand does not fall into that category (it is not specifically about idealism, nor is it officially deadly), the complaint at hand is irrelevant here, despite being an important bone of contention concerning Humeanism in general.…”

Humeanism about laws of nature

“…So, the Humean needs some story about why chaining occurs in some cases, but not in the cases that cause a problem for the Humean response to the circularity objection. Bhogal (2020) and Dorst (2019a) both claim that the key is for the Humean to identify the differing aims of scientific and metaphysical explanation. Bhogal claims that scientific explanations are distinctively unificatory, so metaphysical explanations can chain with scientific explanations only in the cases where the metaphysical explanations contribute to unification.…”

There is no measurement problem for Humeans

“…12 10 Bell's example texts include Dirac (1948), Gottfried (1966), and Landau and Lifschitz (1977). 11 Compare, e.g., Maudlin (2019), pp. 3-4: "The imprecisions in the formulation of the quantum mechanical recipe do not have noticeable practical effects when it comes to making predictions.…”