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The Categorical Conceptions of Laws
This chapter is devoted to a presentation and critique of the categorical conceptions of laws. For categorical monists, only categorical properties...
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Laws of Nature and Theory Choice
I articulate a Global Best-System Account (GBSA) of laws of nature along broadly Mill–Ramsey–Lewis lines. The guiding idea is that the job of laws is...
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The Babylonian Conception and Conventionalism About Laws in Physics
In this paper I discuss two features of laws in physics and ask to what extent these features are compatible with different philosophical accounts of...
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Williamson’s Abductive Case for the Material Conditional Account
In Suppose and Tell , Williamson makes a new and original attempt to defend the material conditional account of indicative conditionals. His...
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Ramsey’s conditionals
In this paper, we propose a unified account of conditionals inspired by Frank Ramsey. Most contemporary philosophers agree that Ramsey’s account...
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How to be a powers theorist about functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries
This paper defends an account of the laws of nature in terms of irreducibly modal properties (aka powers ) from the threat posed by functional laws,...
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“The Only Strictly Correct Method of Philosophy”: Logical Analysis and Anti-Metaphysical Dialectic
The Tractatus revolves around the connection between two central topics – the preconditions of symbolic representation and the nature of...
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Laws beyond spacetime
Quantum gravity’s suggestion that spacetime may be emergent and so only exist contingently would force a radical reconception of extant analyses of...
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Laws of Nature as Epistemic Infrastructure Not Metaphysical Superstructure
The status of laws of nature has been the locus of a lively debate in recent philosophy. Most participants have assumed laws play an important role...
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Revaluing Laws of Nature in Secularized Science
Discovering laws of nature was a way to worship a law-giving God, during the Scientific Revolution. So why should we consider it worthwhile now, in...
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The Implicative Conditional
This paper investigates the implicative conditional, a connective intended to describe the logical behavior of an empirically defined class of...
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The Humean pragmatic turn and the case for revisionary best systems accounts
Lewis’s original Best Systems Account of laws was not motivated much by pragmatics. But recent commentary on his general approach to laws has taken a...
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The Evidential Conditional
This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account , which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its...
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Williams, Pragmatism, and the Law
This paper views Bernard Williams through the lens of the pragmatist tradition. The central insight of pragmatism is that philosophy must start with...
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Euclidean spacetime functionalism
We explore the significance of physical theories set in Euclidean spacetimes (i.e., theories with Riemannian rather than pseudo-Riemannian metrical...
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Indicative conditionals: probabilities and relevance
We propose a new account of indicative conditionals, giving acceptability and logical closure conditions for them. We start from Adams’ Thesis: the...
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Cosmic hylomorphism
The primitive ontology approach to quantum mechanics seeks to account for quantum phenomena in terms of a distribution of matter in three-dimensional...