The Law-Governed Universe

Making best systems best for us

“…notions of strength and simplicity ought to be understood and whether the BSA really succeeds in correctly delineating the laws from the non-laws (see, e.g., Earman 1984, 1986, Loewer 1996, Roberts 2008, and Woodward 2014.…”

Quantum states for primitive ontologists

“…32 It is sometimes suggested that the best-system account of laws be generalized so that the characteristic postulates of statistical mechanics (which are not generalizations, and so do not count as laws under Lewis's version of the account) will come out as laws at our world (for this suggestion, see Loewer 2001or Callender 2004. This leads others to object that it is a weakness of best-system approach that it lends itself so readily to a blurring of the distinction between between laws and initial conditions (see Roberts 2008, Section 1.6). 33 Other considerations arising out of quantum statistical mechanics suggest a similar sort of picture (see Ruetsche 2011). So, for many philosophers at least, the fact the the wave-function-aslaw approach involves grades of physical necessity need not be much of an impediment-although one might still of course worry that the fact that there is so little imaginative resistance when one is asked to imagine the wave-function being different from what it actually is suggests that the present approach accords very ill with how we are used to thinking about quantum mechanics.…”

II—L. A. Paul: Categorical Priority and Categorical Collapse

“…So, for the purposes of this discussion, let's explicitly accept this sort of pluralism, that is, let's assume a picture where we have a propertied and related space-time composed of smaller spatiotemporal regions, and where these smaller regions either are or are occupied by propertied and related substances of some sort that compose a substantial propertied and related whole (the 'substantial manifold'). This account of the manifold will help us tease out a 11 Other views that, while not necessarily reductive, seem to implicitly accept this sort of view include those of Maudlin (2007), who takes laws to be ontologically primitive entities, Carroll (2008), Roberts (2008) and Lange (2009 characterization of the role played by the metaphysical presupposition of substantial categorical priority.…”