1 Laws Form Counterfactually Stable Sets 3
|
|
| 1.1 Welcome 3
|
|
| 1.2 Their Necessity Sets the Laws Apart 4
|
|
| 1.3 The Laws’ Persistence under Counterfactuals 8
|
|
| 1.4 Nomic Preservation 12
|
|
| 1.5 Beyond Nomic Preservation 20
|
|
| 1.6 A Host of Related Problems: Triviality, Circularity, Arbitrariness 25
|
|
| 1.7 Sub-nomic Stability 28
|
|
| 1.8 No Nonmaximal Set Containing Accidents Possesses Sub-nomic Stability 32
|
|
| 1.9 How Two Sub-nomically Stable Sets Must Be Related: Multiple Strata of Natural Laws 37
|
|
| 1.10 Why the Laws Would Still Have Been Laws 42
|
|
| 1.11 Conclusion: Laws Form Stable Sets 43
|
|
2 Natural Necessity 45
|
|
| 2.1 What It Would Take to Understand Natural Necessity 45
|
|
| 2.2 The Euthyphro Question 46
|
|
| 2.3 David Lewis’s “Best System Account” 49
|
|
| 2.4 Lewis’s Account and the Laws’ Supervenience 51
|
|
| 2.5 The Euthyphro Question Returns 56
|
|
| 2.6 Are All Relative Necessities Created Equal? 59
|
|
| 2.7 The Modality Principle 63
|
|
| 2.8 A Proposal for Distinguishing Genuine from Merely Relative Modalities 67
|
|
| 2.9 Borrowing a Strategy from Chapter 1 71
|
|
| 2.10 Necessity as Maximal Invariance 74
|
|
| 2.11 The Laws Form a System 80
|
|
| 2.12 Scientifi c Essentialism Squashes the Pyramid 82
|
|
| 2.13 Why There Is a Natural Ordering of the Genuine Modalities 86
|
|
| 2.14 Conclusion: Necessity, as Maximal Invariance, Involves Stability 88
|
|
3 Three Payoffs of My Account 91
|
|
| 3.1 The Itinerary 91
|
|
| 3.2 Could the Laws of Nature Change? 92
|
|
| 3.3 Why the Laws Are Immutable 96
|
|
| 3.4 Symmetry Principles as Meta-laws 104
|
|
| 3.5 The Symmetry Meta-laws Form a Nomically Stable Set 110
|
|
| 3.6 The Relation between Chancy Facts and Deterministic Laws 120
|
|
| 3.7 How to Account for the Relation 129
|
|
4 A World of Subjunctives 135
|
|
| 4.1 What If the Lawmakers Were Subjunctive Facts? 135
|
|
| 4.2 The Lawmaker’s Regress 142
|
|
| 4.3 Stability 150
|
|
| 4.4 Avoiding Adhocery 156
|
|
| 4.5 Instantaneous Rates of Change and the Causal Explanation Problem 162
|
|
| 4.6 Et in Arcadia Ego 172
|
|
| 4.7 The Rule of Law 176
|
|
| 4.8 Why the Laws Must Be Complete 181
|
|
| 4.9 Envoi: Am I Cheating? 188
|
|
| Notes 191
|
|
| References 243
|
|
| Index 253
|
|
|
|
|
