Dewar, Neil and Weatherall, James Owen (2024) A Treatise of Humean Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into The Metaphysics of Laws; And, Dialogues Concerning Natural Philosophy. [Preprint]

Text Humeanism archive.pdf - Submitted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (185kB)

Abstract

This paper contends that Humeanism suffers from a major flaw: it is unable to explain why the practice of experimental science—i.e., the practice of creating novel circumstances and seeing what happens—should be expected to lead to scientific knowledge. In particular, it is unclear how the Humean can make sense of local, concrete inquiry yielding knowledge which is global in scope, lawlike in character, and counterfactually robust. As a result, Humeanism is left without a plausible account of scientific epistemology.

---

Export/Citation:

EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL

Social Networking:

Share |

---

Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Dewar, Neil nad42@cam.ac.uk 0000-0001-6623-4529 Weatherall, James Owen weatherj@uci.edu 0000-0003-1461-7821
Keywords:	Humeanism, laws of nature, experiment, intervention
Subjects:	General Issues > Laws of Nature
Depositing User:	James Owen Weatherall
Date Deposited:	05 Oct 2024 11:46
Last Modified:	05 Oct 2024 11:46
Item ID:	24011
Subjects:	General Issues > Laws of Nature
Date:	2024
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24011

Monthly Views for the past 3 years

Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years

Plum Analytics

Actions (login required)

View Item