Peter Tan (University of Virginia)
I argue that Humean accounts of lawhood conflict with what science tells us about the laws' relation to counterfactuals. Scientific reasoning about the laws indicates that some actual laws are preserved even under counterfactual suppositions which violate other laws, i.e., counternomic suppositions. But those counternomic suppositions also imply that the actual regularities the Humean takes to be relevant to the preserved law would not have obtained. So, Humeanism seems to judge that those same counternomic antecedents that science tells us are law-preserving are not law-preserving.
