Laws of Nature

Michael Hicks (University of Cologne)
The laws of nature have an interesting internal explanatory structure. This leads to interesting questions for metaphysicians of laws: what is the nature of this explanation? Marc Lange has recently argued in favor of metalaws: higher-order laws governing other laws, of which symmetry principles may be an example. Lange argues that his view, unlike its competitors, can make sense of this. Here, I agree with Lange about the explanatory structure of laws, but disagree with him about the nature of this explanation. I then present a Humean view that neatly captures the explanatory power of symmetry principles.

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.

Max Bialek (Rutgers University)
It is a standard feature of the BSA and its variants that systematizations of the world competing to be the best must be expressed in the same language. This paper argues that such single language privileging is problematic because (1) it enhances the objection that the BSA is insufficiently objective, and (2) it breaks the parallel between the BSA and scientific practice by not letting laws and basic kinds be identified/discovered together. A solution to these problems and the ones that prompt single language privileging is proposed in the form of privileging the best system competition(s).

Balazs Gyenis (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for the Humanities)
We call attention to different formulations of how physical laws relate to what is physically possible in the philosophical literature, and argue that it may be the case that determinism fails under one formulation but reigns under the other. Whether this is so depends on our view on the nature of laws and may also depend on the inter-theoretical relationships among our best physical theories, or so shall we argue.