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SUMMARY:Laws unconstrained: against minimal primitivism about laws of natu
 re - Michael Townsen Hicks (University of Birmingham)
DTSTART:20230426T120000Z
DTEND:20230426T133000Z
UID:TALK200005@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jacob Stegenga
DESCRIPTION:Recently a number of authors (Adlam (2022)\, Chen and Goldstei
 n (2022)\, building on the views of Mauldin (2007) and Schaffer (2016)) ha
 ve argued that laws of nature should be seen as primitive modal constraint
 s on physical reality. The idea is that laws are primitives which make som
 e things necessary\, and we as philosophers should refrain from speculatin
 g more deeply about their nature. We should\, nonetheless\, speculate enou
 gh to deny both Humean attempts to reduce laws to non-modal facts and Disp
 ositionalist attempts to reduce global laws to locally instantiated modal 
 properties. The view aims to retain the explanatory power of governing law
 s while divorcing them from any connections to dodgy metaphysics of proper
 ties or time which might not be supported by future (or current) physics.\
 n\nIn this talk\, I argue that this primitive proposal faces numerous diff
 iculties. By rejecting any account of the structure of laws\, the view mak
 es it harder to see how laws play their distinctive roles in explanation a
 nd induction. By combining a metaphysically necessary connection between l
 aws and their instances with a strident quietism about the nature of laws\
 , the view makes metaphysical necessity even harder to understand. I concl
 ude with some quite general remarks on the viability of primitivist or pur
 ely structuralist views of laws of nature and nomological modality.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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