178 research outputs found
What Price Changing Laws of Nature?
In this paper, we show that it is not a conceptual truth about laws of nature that they are
immutable (though we are happy to leave it as an open empirical question whether they do
actually change once in a while). In order to do so, we survey three popular accounts of lawhood
â(Armstrong-style) necessitarianism, (Bird-style) dispositionalism and (Lewis-style) âbest system
analysisââand expose the extent, as well as the philosophical cost, of the amendments that
should be enforced in order to leave room for the possibility of changing laws
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