The Package Deal Account of Laws and Properties

The package Deal Account of Laws and Properties forthcoming in Synthese This paper develops an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws I call “the Package Deal Account (PDA)” that is a descendent of Lewis’ BSA but differs from it in a number of significant ways. It also rejects some elements of the metaphysics in which Lewis develops his BSA. First, Lewis proposed a metaphysical thesis about fundamental properties he calls “Humean Supervenience” (HS) according to which all fundamental properties are instantiated by points or point sized individuals and the only fundamental relations are geometrical spatial and temporal relations between these. While the BSA does not require HS Lewis seems to hope that it is true. In contrast, the PDA is not committed to HS or even to the fundamental arena in which fundamental properties are instantiated possessing geometrical structure and thus is able to accommodate relations and structures found in contemporary physics that apparently conflict with HS. Second, although Lewis’ BSA doesn’t require HS his Humeanism does require that fundamental properties are categorical. In contrast, the PDA allows for the possibility that fundamental properties are individuated in terms of laws and so are not categorical. Third, the PDA expands and develops the criteria for what counts in favor of a candidate system with more attention to the criteria employed by physicists in evaluating proposed theories. Fourth and most importantly, unlike Lewis’ BSA, the PDA does not presuppose metaphysically primitive elite properties/quantities that Lewis calls “perfectly natural” properties/quantities or presuppose a metaphysically preferred language whose terms denote such properties/quantities. It replaces Lewis’ account with an account on which natural properties are not metaphysically prior to the laws but are elements of a package that includes a fundamental arena that plays the role of space-time as well as fundamental laws and properties. By doing so it responds to some epistemological and metaphysical issues that have been raised regarding natural properties and their role in the BSA. In sum, the PDA goes further in explicating the notion of laws in terms of the aims and practices of science especially fundamental physics rather than in terms of prior metaphysics. I begin by reviewing Lewis’ account of perfectly natural properties and his Humean BSA of laws

The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus

The “Consequence Argument” has spawned an enormous literature in response. The most notable of these is David Lewis’ based on his account of counterfactuals. My excuse for adding to this literature is while Lewis’ diagnosis of the argument is on the right track the account of counterfactuals he relies on to rebut the argument is, as I will argue, defective. I will develop a response that is in some ways similar to Lewis’ but differs in that it is based on a different and better account of counterfactuals which itself is based on an approach to statistical mechanics that goes back to Boltzmann and has more recently been developed by David Albert in his book Time and Chance. This account, which Albert and I refer to as “the Mentaculus”, provides a framework for explaining and connecting the various so called “arrows of time” including those of thermodynamics, causation, knowledge, and influence. It is the last of these arrows that is key to my response to the consequence argument. If my response is effective, then it will turn out that physics (together with some philosophy) rather than conflicting with freedom is able to rescue it, at least, from the Consequence Argument

The Package Deal Account of Laws and Properties

The package Deal Account of Laws and Properties forthcoming in Synthese This paper develops an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws I call “the Package Deal Account (PDA)” that is a descendent of Lewis’ BSA but differs from it in a number of significant ways. It also rejects some elements of the metaphysics in which Lewis develops his BSA. First, Lewis proposed a metaphysical thesis about fundamental properties he calls “Humean Supervenience” (HS) according to which all fundamental properties are instantiated by points or point sized individuals and the only fundamental relations are geometrical spatial and temporal relations between these. While the BSA does not require HS Lewis seems to hope that it is true. In contrast, the PDA is not committed to HS or even to the fundamental arena in which fundamental properties are instantiated possessing geometrical structure and thus is able to accommodate relations and structures found in contemporary physics that apparently conflict with HS. Second, although Lewis’ BSA doesn’t require HS his Humeanism does require that fundamental properties are categorical. In contrast, the PDA allows for the possibility that fundamental properties are individuated in terms of laws and so are not categorical. Third, the PDA expands and develops the criteria for what counts in favor of a candidate system with more attention to the criteria employed by physicists in evaluating proposed theories. Fourth and most importantly, unlike Lewis’ BSA, the PDA does not presuppose metaphysically primitive elite properties/quantities that Lewis calls “perfectly natural” properties/quantities or presuppose a metaphysically preferred language whose terms denote such properties/quantities. It replaces Lewis’ account with an account on which natural properties are not metaphysically prior to the laws but are elements of a package that includes a fundamental arena that plays the role of space-time as well as fundamental laws and properties. By doing so it responds to some epistemological and metaphysical issues that have been raised regarding natural properties and their role in the BSA. In sum, the PDA goes further in explicating the notion of laws in terms of the aims and practices of science especially fundamental physics rather than in terms of prior metaphysics. I begin by reviewing Lewis’ account of perfectly natural properties and his Humean BSA of laws

Are Humean Laws Flukes?

It has been argued (by e.g. Galen Strawson and John Foster) contra Humean accounts of scientific laws that on Humean accounts laws are flukes since they are merely true generalizations and it would be an accident or a fluke for a generalization to obtain unless there was a non-Humean law "backing" it. This paper argues that this kind of objection is mistaken. It goes on to describe an account of laws called "the Package Deal Account" (PDA) that is a descendent of Lewis' BSA on which it is not an accident that our universe has a best systematization

New Probabilistic Account of Counterfactuals

Counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals are enormously important in philosophy, especially in philosophy of science. They are crucial to accounts of laws, causation, dispositions, probability, measurement, knowledge, reliability, decision, the direction of time and much else. In view of this it is surprising that it wasn’t until mid-20th century that serious proposals for the logic, semantics, and analyses of counterfactuals began to appear. The subsequent literature is vast with many proposals, counter examples to proposals, and replies. The most prominent account is David Lewis’ analysis of counterfactuals in terms of possible world similarity. This paper focuses on that account and the problems that it and related approaches based on similarity among possible worlds encounter and offers a new theory that solves those problems by replacing similarity with objective probability. The new account bases counterfactuals on statistical mechanics and thus answers Lewis’ question of how the temporal asymmetry of counterfactuals is related to the second law of thermodynamics. By doing this it accounts for the temporal asymmetry of causal counterfactuals and shows how counterfactuals explain why we can influence the future but not the past and why we can know much more about the past than about the future. The account construes statistical mechanical probabilities in terms of Lewis’ BSA of objective probabilities and laws and thus integrates counterfactuals into that account. By doing this it shows how counterfactuals together with laws and objective probabilities supervene on the distribution of fundamental properties in space-time (the Humean Mosaic)

What Breathers Fire into the Equations

In this paper I will describe an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws and fundamental properties I call “the Package Deal Account (PDA)” that is a descendent of Lewis’ BSA but differs from it in a number of significant ways. The most significant is that unlike Lewis’ BSA, the PDA does not depend on the existence of the metaphysically elite fundamental properties/quantities that Lewis calls “perfectly natural” properties/quantities that are at the basis of his account. It replaces Lewis’ account with an account on which fundamental properties and entities are not metaphysically prior to the laws but on which they and laws are co-equal elements of a package. The PDA earns its Humean credentials by maintaining that laws systematize the distribution of property instantiations and supervene on them

Humean laws and explanation

My primary focus in this paper is on an objection to Humean account of laws and specifically to David Lewis’ “best systems analysis” (BSA). The objection is that the laws according to the BSA (which I call L-laws) fail to account for the ability of laws to explain. In contrast governing laws (which I will call G-laws) are alleged to account for the role of laws in scientific explanations by virtue of their governing role. If governing is required for laws to be explanatory then Humean accounts like Lewis’ are dead in the water since explanation is central to the role of laws in the sciences. However, I will argue that there are effective rebuttals to arguments that Humean laws don’t explain and that actually it is governing accounts that have difficulty with explanation