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The critiques of the regularity theory by Fred Dretske, Michael Tooley, and D. M. Armstrong are shown to fail. A categorization of “accidental generalizations” is offered. The failures of the best system analysis version of the regularity theory, for example, the failure to define simplicity and the failure to produce a measure to weigh the gain in simplicity against the loss of information strength, are cited. Various principles for distinguishing laws from accidental generalizations without invoking necessity are offered. Use is made of James Woodward and Christopher Hitchcock’s approach to explanation in terms of invariant generalizations. A charge of circularity resulting from the use of counterfactuals is rebutted by introducing the theory of counterfactuals of Eric Hiddleston. Results are summarized in the form of a systematicity analysis of three principles designed to distinguish laws from accidental generalizations.

This chapter defends a Humean approach to objective probabilities in physics. Two motivations for a Humean account of probabilities are distinguished: One derives from a general commitment to a Humean account of natural laws. The other, which is articulated in more detail in the chapter, starts from worries that irreducibly probabilistic physical laws are problematic. Such worries are avoided if probabilities are tied to a best system of the world, as D. Lewis has suggested. Lewis’ own account of objective chance is contrasted with a more pragmatic Humean account, in which objective probabilities are divorced from the best system and tied to systems of less simple probability rules instead. The chapter compares the abilities of both Humean accounts to capture the probabilities appearing in our best physical theories.

This chapter examines a variety of modal relationalism that is analogous to the Humean best‐system account of laws of nature. It is argued that best‐system accounts face daunting difficulties: they have intuitively implausible consequences and rely on empirically unsupported psychological presuppositions.

A central tenet of the regularity theory is the doctrine of Humean supervenience (HS), the view that two worlds that are identical in their nonnomic facts must be identical in their laws. John Carroll, John Roberts, and Mark Lange reject HS in favor of the governance principle. All versions of the governance principle fail because they deny the existence of contingent laws and a strong case is made for their existence. Biology is an excellent source of examples. Problems with earlier versions of the regularity theory, e.g., the naïve regularity theory and the best systems analysis, are documented. Since HS depends on the distinction between the nomic and the nonnomic, that distinction is characterized. Carroll’s mirror argument, his appeal to modal principles, and Tooley’s case against the regularity theory are all shown to fail.

This chapter explores rules that may aid ethnoregional parties such as communal lists, reserved seats, and lower thresholds. It first examines countries that reserve seats—sometimes paired with communal lists for separate categories of seats—to assure a certain level of minority representation. It considers the best-loser system, a form of communal balancing unique to Mauritius. It then turns to countries that make it easier for minority parties to overcome legal or implicit thresholds for winning seats. The chapter concludes that reserved seats, lower thresholds and the best-loser system all provide advantages to the election of ethnic minorities. However, only lower thresholds and the best-loser system help ethnoregional parties.

On David Lewis’s influential view, modal facts supervene on the mosaic of non-modal facts about sparse natural properties. This chapter defends a Lewisian account of laws that abandons this supervenience claim in order to avoid the objections of subjectivity and lack of necessity that bedeviled Lewis’s original view. On the author’s view, it is not the Humean mosaic of sparse natural properties that ultimately grounds laws of nature. Instead, it is the (always renegotiable) balance between our ever changing and perspectival standards of simplicity and strength that grounds laws of nature. This view reveals some unexpected resources available to a Humean account of lawhood, at the price of dispensing with Humean supervenience.

Philosophers and others have posited many metaphysical differences between time and space. An old and deep one connects physical modality with time. This chapter develops a particular version of this idea, namely, that the laws of nature distinguish temporal directions. Put loosely, time is the direction in which physics tells its best stories. This novel picture is put to work by showing how it informally “glues” together the different fragments of time.

Laws are potential patterns of causation characterized by the counterfactual analysis. The various accounts of law in the literature—or proposed refinements of them—are not properly thought of as accounts of law but rather ways in which laws may be realized. The various potential counterexamples to Humean accounts of laws are best seen as appealing to worlds in which laws are not realized in the Humean way, rather than showing something about the nature of law. This point is particularly salient bearing in mind the intellectual difficulties of non-Humean accounts of law—such as necessitation between properties accounts or the powers ontology—and the fact that their virtues have been rather overstated. In particular, this is outlined regarding counterfactual support and their alleged superiority in providing a basis for the rationality of induction.

A familiar choice-point in the laws of nature debate is whether the laws do any important metaphysical work. Some philosophers, such as Fred Dretske, Michael Tooley, David Armstrong, and Tim Maudlin, argue that the laws have very important metaphysical work to do because the way the world is depends on the laws. Others, such as David Lewis, Barry Loewer, Jonathan Cohen and Craig Callender, and Alexander Bird argue that the laws do not have important metaphysical work to do because the laws depend on the way the world is. According to the traditional formulation of the Best System Account (BSA), the most basic laws of nature (those that are the aim of ideal, final physics) are those propositions which, taken together, constitute the simplest and most informative description of the world. There are two central, but independent, features of this view. One is that the laws are mere systematizations of the fundamental ontology; they are not metaphysically ‘weighty’ and do not govern. The other is that the laws depend upon only categorical properties and relations. In this chapter I explore the consequences of accepting the first feature while rejecting the second. That is, I explore a best sys-tem account of laws that depends upon potencies. (For the purposes of this chapter, I suppose the fundamental properties are potencies: properties that are essentially dispositional.) I argue that a BSA grounded in potencies is preferable to a BSA grounded in categorical properties. Laws of nature, on this view, are those propositions that constitute the simplest and most informative description of potencies.

In his contribution to this volume, Christopher Meacham identifies a possibly serious defect of the pragmatic Humean approach to laws and chance, compared to the more fundamentalist/reductionist approaches of Lewis and Loewer: a potential inconsistency in the credences that rational agents are advised to have, when two or more different objective chances are ascribed to the same event by distinct parts of the pragmatist’s chance theory. This chapter discusses Meacham’s objections, some of which apply to Hoefer’s approach to objective chance, and some of which apply to Callender and Cohen’s Better Best System account of laws. In the course of defending Hoefer’s account of chance from the inconsistency objection, the chapter also discusses some contentious issues regarding how we should understand the Principal Principle, and in particular whether it should include an ‘admissibility clause’.

Any credible interpretation of objective chance should make sense of the connection between objective chance and rational degree of belief. Ideally, an account that identifies chance with some objective quantity X should be accompanied by a story that explains, from independently plausible assumptions, why X guides rational credence in the way captured by the Principal Principle. In this chapter, this story is provided for various Humean accounts of chance, including frequentist and Best Systems accounts. Along the way, a generalization of the Principal Principle that allows for dyadic and ‘indefinite’ chances is suggested.

The aim of this final chapter is to tie up some of the loose ends in the powers metaphysic. The first part of the chapter discusses what a powers theorist might say about the laws of nature. A hybrid powers-based account of the laws is offered that combines fundamental lawlessness with a best-systems account. Attention then shifts to macroscopic objects. The primary focus of the book has been on the fundamental powers; here the focus turns to the dispositions of middle-sized dry goods and the question of macroscopic persistence. In considering the former, something of a proto-analysis of macroscopic dispositionality is offered. The chapter ends with a discussion of systematic metaphysics.

Just as laws are variably realized so are objective chances: in the patterns identified by the best system analysis and in propensities. Theories of chance face two significant problems: the problem of undermining that is alleged to afflict Humean accounts of chance and, second, the relationship of chance to frequencies and, thus, to successful action. Although some propensity accounts can avoid undermining, they do so at the expense of the second relationship. More concessive propensity theories make some headway with regard to the second problem but start to suffer from the first problem. The perceived advantage for agents in conforming their beliefs to chances, understood as propensities, is rooted in the same mistake about induction identified in Chapter 14. So the successful treatment of chance does not tell in favour of one theory of the laws that support them than another.

A number of philosophers with a metaphysical orientation have criticized the interventionist account of causation that have been defended in Making Things Happen and elsewhere for its failure to provide an account of the metaphysical foundations (or grounds or truth-makers) for causal and explanatory claims. This dialogue attempts to respond to these objections. It explores the question of what is meant by “grounds,” “truth-makers,” and related notions and asks why these need to be provided. It also attempts to raise some general concerns about the rhetorical and argumentative strategies employed in contemporary analytic metaphysics. It also discusses some issues having to do with the relationship between methodology, understood as a core concern of philosophy of science, and analytic metaphysics, arguing for the value and importance of the former and its relative independence from metaphysical concerns.

This chapter defends an invariance-based account of laws of nature. In constructing a physical theory one looks for a cut or contrast between laws and initial conditions such that (i) the laws are generalizations that are stable or invariant across variations in initial conditions and (ii) as much order or structure as possible is represented in the laws, while any remaining disorder is relegated to the initial conditions. This picture corresponds to an ideal of explanation in which laws are freely combinable with different initial conditions to answer a range of what the author has elsewhere called a range of what-if things-had-been-different questions. Laws are understood in terms of a conception of explanation which cannot be captured just in terms of simplicity and strength trade-offs imposed on a supposed Humean mosaic. The resulting account of laws is non-reductive and the associated epistemology very different from the dominant Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account.

Modality is a sticking point for empiricists. Some recognize that science comes with a heavy dose of modal commitment and accept modality on the strength of their commitment to science. Others shun it on the grounds that the semantics of modal belief seems to commit people to non-actual, possible worlds. This paper defends a deflationary realism about modal facts paired with a substantive account of how scientific models are constructed and put to use. The result is a view that takes modal commitment seriously, but understands that commitment in pragmatic rather than metaphysical terms. After reviewing a hurdle for reduction and the function of models and modal structures, the chapter introduces the generic account of modal structures as partially prepared solutions to frequently encountered problems. It then compares the author’s account of laws and chances with David Lewis’s Best Systems Analysis.