Arnold Koslow

The initial part of this paper explores and rejects three standard views of how scientific laws might be systematically connected with physical necessity or possibility. The first concerns laws and their consequences, the second concerns the so‐called counterfactual connection, and the third concerns a possible worlds construction of physical necessity. The remaining part introduces a neglected notion of possibility, and, with the aid of some examples, illustrates the special way in which laws reduce or narrow down possibilities.

.  On a structuralist account of logic, the logical operators, as well as modal operators are defined by the specific ways that they interact with respect to implication. As a consequence, the same logical operator (conjunction, negation etc.) can appear to be very different with a variation in the implication relation of a structure. We illustrate this idea by showing that certain operators that are usually regarded as extra-logical concepts (Tarskian algebraic operations on theories, mereological sum, products and negates of individuals, intuitionistic operations on mathematical problems, epistemic operations on certain belief states) are simply the logical operators that are deployed in different implication structures. That makes certain logical notions more omnipresent than one would think.