Callender, Craig (2021) Humean Laws of Nature: The End of the Good Old Days. [Preprint]

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Abstract

I show how the two great Humean ways of understanding laws of nature, projectivism and systems theory, have unwittingly reprised developments in metaethics over the past century. This demonstration helps us explain and understand trends in both literatures. It also allows work on laws to “leap- frog” over the birth of many new positions, the nomic counterparts of new theories in metaethics. However, like leap-frogging from (say) agriculture to the internet age, it’s hardly clear that we’ve landed in a good place. My reactionary advice is to return to Hume and work on the central insights that motivated Humeanism about modality in the first place. When updated with contemporary insights, there we will find an attractive naturalistic theory of laws, or so I’ll argue, and along the way we’ll see how projectivism and systems theory both get something right about this overall theory.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Callender, Craig ccallender@ucsd.edu 0000-0002-9192-0018
Keywords:	laws of nature meta-ethics Hume Best System Projectivism
Subjects:	General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics General Issues > Causation General Issues > Laws of Nature General Issues > Structure of Theories
Depositing User:	Craig Callender
Date Deposited:	10 Jan 2021 03:16
Last Modified:	10 Jan 2021 03:16
Item ID:	18585
Subjects:	General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics General Issues > Causation General Issues > Laws of Nature General Issues > Structure of Theories
Date:	8 January 2021
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/18585

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