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General Philosophy of Science > Laws of Nature > Laws of Nature and Other Categories > Governance and Laws of Nature
Governance and Laws of Nature
Edited by Markus Schrenk (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Assistant editor: Daian Bica (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
About this topic
| Summary | Some believe that laws of nature, or something underlying the laws, govern the events in the world: what a law says must happen (or, what a law forbids can’t happen). Some governing enthusiasts even claim that the laws somehow produce or generate the events falling under them. For others, laws have a mere descriptive character: the laws are (only) accurate descriptions of what regularly happens or is universally the case. Those who hold that the laws govern do not think the second intuition is wrong. In fact, if, what the laws (or their ground) demand, must happen, then it also does happen and we get the regularities for free. Yet, those who subscribe to some kind of regularity view deny that laws necessitate or produce anything. For governance, many names have been given: ‘guidance’, ‘production’, ‘necessitation‘ (already Hume wrote in the Treatise that „efficacy, agency, power, force, energy, necessity, connexion, and productive quality, are all nearly synonymous.”) and different approaches have been given as to what it could mean that laws govern their instances: Armstrong, Tooley, Dretske have spelled that out in terms of necessitation (not to be confused with necessity!), some dispositional essentialists like Bird in terms of metaphysical necessity, others, like Maudlin, say that laws produce future states from earlier states. |
| Key works | Beebee 2000, Wilsch 2020, Emery 2022 |
| Introductions | Schrenk 2014, Chapter Two, Jaag & Schrenk 2020, Hildebrand 2023 |
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- The grounding conception of governance.Ashley Coates - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.According to the governing conception of the laws of nature, laws, in some sense, determine concrete goings-on. Just how to understand the sort of determination at play in governance is, however, a substantial question. One potential answer to this question, which has recently received some attention, is that laws govern by grounding what happens in the concrete world. If this account succeeded, it would show that governance can be understood in terms of an independently motivated and widely accepted notion. Thus (...)
- Primitive Governance.Noga Gratvol - forthcoming - Noûs.Laws of nature are sometimes said to govern their instances. Spelling out what governance is, however, is an important task that has only recently received sustained philosophical attention. In the first part of this paper, I argue against the two prominent reductive views of governance—modal views and grounding views. Ruling out the promising candidates for reduction supports the claim that governance is sui generis. In the second part of this paper, I argue that governance is subject to a contingency requirement. (...)
- Lawful Persistence.David Builes & Trevor Teitel - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):5-30.The central aim of this paper is to use a particular view about how the laws of nature govern the evolution of our universe in order to develop and evaluate the two main competing options in the metaphysics of persistence, namely endurantism and perdurantism. We begin by motivating the view that our laws of nature dictate not only qualitative facts about the future, but also which objects will instantiate which qualitative properties. We then show that both traditional doctrines in the (...)
- Governing Without A Fundamental Direction of Time: Minimal Primitivism about Laws of Nature.Eddy Keming Chen & Sheldon Goldstein - 2022 - In Yemima Ben-Menahem, Rethinking Laws of Nature. Springer. pp. 21-64.The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...)
- (1 other version)The Governing Conception of Laws.Nina Emery - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.In her paper, “The Non-Governing Conception of Laws,” Helen Beebee argues that it is not a conceptual truth that laws of nature govern, and thus that one need not insist on a metaphysical account of laws that makes sense of their governing role. I agree with the first point but not the second. Although it is not a conceptual truth, the fact that laws govern follows straightforwardly from an important (though under-appreciated) principle of scientific theory choice combined with a highly (...)
- The Metaphysics of Laws of Nature: The Rules of the Game.Walter Ott - 2022 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.It can seem obvious that we live in a world governed by laws of nature, yet it was not until the seventeenth century that the concept of a law came to the fore. Ever since, it has been attended by controversy: what does it mean to say that Boyle's law governs the expansion of a gas, or that the planets obey the law of gravity? Laws are rules that permit calculations and predictions. What does the universe have to be like, (...)
- The Power to Govern.Erica Shumener - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):270-291.I provide a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern the evolution of events. I locate the source of governance in the content of law propositions. As such, I do not appeal to primitive notions of ground, essence, or production to characterize governance. After introducing the account, I use it to outline previously unrecognized varieties of governance. I also specify that laws must govern to have two theoretical virtues: explanatory power as well as a (...)
- Governing Laws and the Inference Problem.Stavros Ioannidis, Vassilis Livanios & Stathis Psillos - 2021 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 98 (3):395-411.How do non-Humean laws govern regularities in nature? According to the Inference Problem, non-Humean accounts of governing face a central problem: it is not clear how such laws do perform their governing function. Recently, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that the introduction of a law-to-regularity axiom is sufficient to solve the Inference Problem. The authors argue that Schaffer’s solution faces a devastating dilemma: either the required axiom cannot, on its own, differentiate the non-Humean account from a Humean account of laws or, (...)
- The governance of laws of nature: guidance and production.Tobias Wilsch - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):909-933.Realists about laws of nature and their Humean opponents disagree on whether laws ‘govern’. An independent commitment to the ‘governing conception’ of laws pushes many towards the realist camp. Despite its significance, however, no satisfactory account of governance has been offered. The goal of this article is to develop such an account. I base my account on two claims. First, we should distinguish two notions of governance, ‘guidance’ and ‘production’, and secondly, explanatory phenomena other than laws are also candidates for (...)
- Stable regularities without governing laws?Aldo Filomeno - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 66:186-197.Can stable regularities be explained without appealing to governing laws or any other modal notion? In this paper, I consider what I will call a ‘Humean system’—a generic dynamical system without guiding laws—and assess whether it could display stable regularities. First, I present what can be interpreted as an account of the rise of stable regularities, following from Strevens [2003], which has been applied to explain the patterns of complex systems (such as those from meteorology and statistical mechanics). Second, since (...)
- Scientific Practice and the Epistemology of Governing Laws.Tyler Hildebrand - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (2):174-188.This article is concerned with the relationship between scientific practice and the metaphysics of laws of nature and natural properties. I begin by examining an argument by Michael Townsen Hicks and Jonathan Schaffer that an important feature of scientific practice—namely, that scientists sometimes invoke non-fundamental properties in fundamental laws—is incompatible with metaphysical theories according to which laws govern. I respond to their argument by developing an epistemology for governing laws that is grounded in scientific practice. This epistemology is of general (...)
- The Certainty, Modality, and Grounding of Newton’s Laws.Zvi Biener & Eric Schliesser - 2017 - The Monist 100 (3):311-325.Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is (...)
- It is the Business of Laws to Govern.Jonathan Schaffer - 2016 - Dialectica 70 (4):577-588.Non-Humean accounts of lawhood are said to founder on the Inference Problem, which is the problem of saying how laws that go beyond the regularities can entail the regularities. I argue that the Inference Problem has a simple solution – the Axiomatic Solution – on which the non-Humean only needs to outfit her laws with a law-to-regularity axiom. There is a remaining Epistemic Bulge, as to why one should believe that the posit-so-axiomatized is to be found in nature, but the (...)
- Universals, laws, and governance.Matthew Tugby - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1147-1163.Proponents of the dispositional theory of properties typically claim that their view is not one that offers a realist, governing conception of laws. My first aim is to show that, contrary to this claim, if one commits to dispositionalism then one does not automatically give up on a robust, realist theory of laws. This is because dispositionalism can readily be developed within a Platonic framework of universals. Second, I argue that there are good reasons for realist dispositionalists to favour a (...)
- John T. Roberts: The Law-Governed Universe. [REVIEW]John W. Carroll - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (4):895-901.
- Measuring and governing: John T. Roberts: The Law-Governed Universe. Oxford University Press, New York, 2008, xii + 407 pp. US$ 100.00 HB.Michael Baumgartner - 2010 - Metascience 19 (3):409-412.
- The Law Governed Universe.John T. Roberts - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press.The law-governed world-picture -- A remarkable idea about the way the universe is cosmos and compulsion -- The laws as the cosmic order : the best-system approach -- The three ways : no-laws, non-governing-laws, governing-laws -- Work that laws do in science -- An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order -- The picture in four theses -- The strategy of this book -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The measurability approach to laws -- What (...)
- What is the significance of the intuition that laws of nature govern?Susan Schneider - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2):307-324.Recently, proponents of Humean Supervenience have challenged the plausibility of the intuition that the laws of nature ‘govern’, or guide, the evolution of events in the universe. Certain influential thought experiments authored by John Carroll, Michael Tooley, and others, rely strongly on such intuitions. These thought experiments are generally regarded as playing a central role in the lawhood debate, suggesting that the Mill-Ramsey-Lewis view of the laws of nature, and the related doctrine of the Humean Supervenience of laws, are false. (...)
- Laws, explanation, governing, and generation.Barry Ward - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (4):537 – 552.Advocates and opponents of Humean Supervenience (HS) have neglected a crucial feature of nomic explanation: laws can explain by generating descriptions of possibilities. Dretske and Armstrong have opposed HS by arguing that laws construed as Humean regularities cannot explain, but their arguments fail precisely because they neglect to consider this generating role of laws. Humeans have dismissed the intuitive violations of HS manifested by John Carroll's Mirror Worlds as erroneous, but distinguishing the laws' generating role from the non-Humean notion that (...)
- Laws and Lawlessness.Stephen Mumford - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):397-413.I develop a metaphysical position that is both lawless and anti-Humean. The position is called realist lawlessness and contrasts with both Humean lawlessness and nomological realism – the claim that there are laws in nature. While the Humean view also allows no laws, realist lawlessness is not Humean because it accepts some necessary connections in nature between distinct properties. Realism about laws, on the other hand, faces a central dilemma. Either laws govern the behaviour of properties from the outside or (...)
- Limited realism: Cartwright on natures and laws.L. A. Paul - 2002 - Philosophical Books 43:244-253.A leaf falls to the ground, wafting lazily on the afternoon breeze. Clouds move across the sky, and birds sing. Are these events governed by universal laws of nature, laws that apply everywhere without exception, subsuming events such as the falling of the leaf, the movement of the clouds and the singing of the birds? Are such laws part of a small set of fundamental laws, or descended from such a set, which govern everything there is in the world?
- Laws of nature.Norman Swartz - 2001 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.Within metaphysics, there are two competing theories of Laws of Nature. On one account, the Regularity Theory, Laws of Nature are statements of the uniformities or regularities in the world; they are mere descriptions of the way the world is. On the other account, the Necessitarian Theory, Laws of Nature are the “principles” which govern the natural phenomena of the world. That is, the natural world “obeys” the Laws of Nature. This seemingly innocuous difference marks one of the most profound (...)
- The Non-Governing Conception of Laws of Nature.Helen Beebee - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (3):571-594.Recently several thought experiments have been developed (by John Carroll amongst others) which have been alleged to refute the Ramsey-Lewis view of laws of nature. The paper aims to show that two such thought experiments fail to establish that the Ramsey-Lewis view is false, since they presuppose a conception of laws of nature that is radically at odds with the Humean conception of laws embodied by the Ramsey-Lewis view. In particular, the thought experiments presuppose that laws of nature govern the (...)
- The Modal Status of Natural Laws.Erik Andrew Anderson - 1997 - Dissertation, University of Colorado at BoulderAccording to a popular realist conception, the laws of nature not only describe, but indeed govern what happens in the empirical world. Thus, according to this view, laws are "modally stronger" than mere contingent, empirical regularities. At the same time, this conception has it that the laws of nature could have been other than they actually are. Thus, according to this view, laws are "modally weaker" than logical necessities. As such, this view of laws, which I call the Weak Thesis, (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Getting Away from Governance: A Structuralist Approach to Laws and Symmetries.Angelo Cei & Steven French - unknownDispositionalist accounts of scientific laws are currently at the forefront of discussions in the metaphysics of science. However, Mumford has presented such accounts with the following dilemma: if laws are to have a governing role, then they cannot be grounded in the relevant dispositions; if on the other hand, they are so grounded, then they cannot perform such a role. Mumford’s solution is drastic: to do away with laws as metaphysically substantive entities altogether. Dispositionalist accounts are also deficient in that (...)
- Laws and Powers in the Frame of Nature.Stathis Psillos - unknownThe aim of this paper is to revisit the major arguments of the seventeenth century debate concerning laws and powers. Its primary points are two. First, though the dominant conception of nature was such that there was no room for power in bodies, the very idea that laws govern the behaviour of matter in motion brought with it the following issue, which came under sharp focus in the work of Leibniz: how possibly can passive matter, devoid of power, obey laws? (...)
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