Heather Demarest

What, ontologically speaking, are best system laws? Should the laws of the best system account be identified with sentences, or propositions, or perhaps something else? These questions differ from more familiar questions about which criteria we should use to pick out the best system laws: regardless of whether laws are picked out using simplicity, informativeness, tractability, predictability, perfect naturalness, or whatever, there remains the question of what, ontologically, the best system laws are. But very little has been written on this issue; and what has been written is often ambiguous. So in this paper, we present and evaluate three ontological options for best system laws: taking them to be sentences, unstructured propositions, and structured propositions. Surprisingly, the two most cited options—sentences and unstructured propositions—face significant problems. Defenders of the best system account might want to take seriously the idea that best system laws are structured propositions.

There is a popular view in metaphysics: a mental state exists at a time and depends on a brain state at that time. This is difficult to reconcile with a central claim from special relativity: what exists at a time depends on an arbitrary foliation of spacetime. Together, these seem to suggest that brain states and their accompanying mental states depend on arbitrary foliations of spacetime. I argue that a further implication is that there could be rogue mental states and, worse, rogue persons that overlap with an ordinary person, but that are nonetheless introspectively inaccessible to that person. I go on to argue that functional and intelligibility requirements allow us to privilege a person’s rest foliation. I conclude that most rogue mental states are unintelligible and that rogue persons are exceedingly rare.

According to our ordinary, commonsense notion of time, there is an absolute fact of the matter about simultaneity whether two events happen at the same time or not. There is also an absolute fact of the matter about duration—how much time elapses between two events. However, according to a straightforward reading of special relativity, these commonsense notions are wrong. If we take any ordinary process, such as the ticking of a clock, we find that it proceeds at different rates from different perspectives—perspectives that seem to be equally legitimate. According to a straightforward reading of special relativity, simultaneity, duration, and even the order in which some events occur, turn out to be perspectival, or frame-dependent, rather than objective. I will first explain why this is, and then I will go on to explore some further philosophical consequences.

Recently, philosophers have argued that the laws of Lewis’s Best System Analysis (BSA) are not pragmatically useful. In this paper, I argue that these criticisms are substantive only because the BSA laws are characterized independently of their pragmatic roles. It is important to maintain the distinction between what the laws _are_ and what the laws should _do_ if we are to engage in the traditional, metaphysical debates found in the laws literature. While it is plausible that usefulness is an important criterion by which we judge the _success_ of a Humean best system, I argue that we should not take usefulness to _constitute_ a Humean best system. In response to the shortcomings of Lewis’s BSA, many authors have developed new “pragmatic” Humean best system accounts. I argue that these accounts are not characterized independently of the useful roles they are supposed to play for us. This leaves them vulnerable to objections that they may be stipulating the virtues they claim to explain, or they may fail to be Humean best system accounts at all.

There is a long tradition of preferring local theories to ones that posit lawful or causal influence at a spacetime distance. In this paper, we argue against this preference. We argue that nonlocality is scientifically unobjectionable and that nonlocal theories can be known. Scientists can gather evi- dence for them and confirm them in much the same way that they do for local theories. We think these observations point to a deeper constraint on scientific theorizing and experi- mentation: the (quasi-) isolation of causal or lawful influ- ence. We argue that this requirement ought to replace the locality desideratum in science. We then explore the pos- sibility that the order of explanation has been reversed: per- haps it is isolatable influence that determines what counts as local in the first place.

For Humeans, many facts—even ones intuitively “about” particular, localized macroscopic parts of the world—turn out to depend on surprisingly global fundamental bases. We investigate some counterintuitive consequences of this picture. Many counterfactuals whose antecedents describe intuitively localized, non-actual states of affairs nevertheless end up involving wide-ranging implications for the global, embedding Humean mosaic. The case of self-undermining chances is a familiar example of this. We examine that example in detail and argue that popular existing strategies such as “holding the laws fixed as laws” or “holding the laws fixed as true” are of no help. Interestingly, we show how a new proposal that draws on the resources of the Mentaculus can yield the right results—but only on the assumption that the Humean can make cross-world identifications. We go on to argue that the Humean cannot make such identifications. We conclude that the root of this trouble is deeper, and its reach broader, than the familiar cases suggest. We think it is very much an open question whether the Humean has sufficient resources to properly conceptualize macroscopic objects or to analyze these “local” counterfactuals.

This book is a collection of interesting papers edited by Walter Ott and Lydia Patton. It fills an oft-noted gap in the laws literature: namely, connecting familiar contemporary accounts to their early modern predecessors. Chapters one through six describe and evaluate several different notions of laws that appear in early modern history and explore how those transformed into contemporary notions. Chapters seven through twelve address familiar topics in current laws literature. The first half of the book provides an excellent backdrop for contemporary debates while the second half of the book advances those debates. Readers will benefit from the rich and suggestive connections developed in these pages.

The laws of nature are central to our understanding of the world. And while there is often broad agreement about the technical formulations of the laws, there can be sharp disagreement about the metaphysical nature of the laws. For instance, the Newtonian laws of nature can be stated and analyzed by appealing to a set of possible worlds. Yet, some philosophers argue the worlds are mere notational devices, while others take them to be robust, concrete entities in their own right. In this paper, I use a recent view of laws called the Mentaculus as a case study to illustrate the wide variety of metaphysical pictures that can accompany such a view. I conclude that the technical features of the laws -- typically (though not always) given to us by practicing scientists -- are compatible with many different metaphysical foundations.

I argue that the best scientific package is anti-Humean in its ontology, but Humean in its laws. This is because potencies and the best system account of laws complement each other surprisingly well. If there are potencies, then the BSA is the most plausible account of the laws of nature. Conversely, if the BSA is the correct theory of laws, then formulating the laws in terms of potencies rather than categorical properties avoids three serious objections: the mismatch objection, the impoverished worlds objection, and the metaphysical 'oomph' objection. I argue that combining anti-Humean properties with Humean laws into a Potency-Best System Account of Laws is a powerful and science-friendly account---something that people on both sides should be able to appreciate.

On average, women make up half of introductory-level philosophy courses, but only one-third of upper-division courses. We contribute to the growing literature on this problem by reporting the striking results of our study at the University of Oklahoma. We found that two attitudes are especially strong predictors of whether women are likely to continue in philosophy: feeling similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers, and enjoying philosophical puzzles and issues. In a regression analysis, they account for 63% of variance. Importantly, women are significantly less likely to hold these attitudes than men. Thus, instructors who care about improving the retention of women undergraduates should find ways to improve these attitudes – for instance, by demonstrating the ways in which professional philosophers are like them. We will discuss some tentative but intuitively plausible suggestions for interventions, though further research is required to establish the effectiveness of those interventions.

If a person, A, branches into B and C, then it is widely held that B and C are not identical to one another. Many think that this is because B and C have contradictory properties at the same time. In this paper, I show why this explanation cannot be right. I argue that contradictory properties at times are not necessary for non-identity between descendants, and that contradictory properties at times are not sufficient for non-identity. I also argue that the standard explanation cannot be salvaged by a shift to personal time. Appeals to a lack of continuity, or to the absence of unity of consciousness likewise fail. Rather, B and C are non-identical simply because A branched into B and C. Why branching should be problematic for personal identity remains a deep puzzle though I offer some tentative suggestions.

Fundamental properties and the laws of nature go hand in hand: mass and gravitation, charge and electromagnetism, spin and quantum mechanics. So, it is unsurprising that one's account of fundamental properties affects one's view of the laws of nature and vice versa. In this essay, I will survey a variety of recent attempts to provide a joint account of the fundamental properties and the laws of nature. Many of these accounts are new and unexplored. Some of them posit surprising entities, such as counterfacts. Other accounts posit surprising laws of nature, such as instantaneous laws that constrain the initial configuration of particles. These exciting developments challenge our assumptions about our basic ontology and provide fertile ground for further exploration.

In a deterministically evolving world, the usefulness of nontrivial probabilities can seem mysterious. I use the ‘Mentaculus’ machinery developed by David Albert and Barry Loewer to show how all probabilities in such a world can be derived from a single, initial chance event. I go on to argue that this is the only genuine chance event. Perhaps surprisingly, we have good evidence of its existence and nature. I argue that the existence of this chance event justifies our epistemic reliance on nontrivial probabilities.

Most philosophers of science hold that the laws of nature play an important role in determining which counterfactuals are true. Marc Lange reverses this dependence, arguing that it is the truth of certain counterfactuals that determines which statements are laws. I argue that the context sensitivity of counterfactual sentences makes it impossible for them to determine the laws. Next, I argue that Lange’s view cannot avoid additional counterexamples concerning nested counterfactuals. Finally, I argue that Lange’s counterfacts, posited as the ultimate ontological ground for the laws of nature, are unsuited to the role he demands of them.