Contemporary debate over laws of nature centers around Humean supervenience, the thesis that everything supervenes on the distribution of non-nomic facts. The key ingredient of this thesis is the idea that nomic-like concepts—law, chance, causation, etc.—are expressible in terms of the regularities of non-nomic facts. Inherent to this idea is the tacit conviction that regularities, “constant conjunctions” of non-nomic facts do supervene on the distribution of non-nomic facts. This paper raises a challenge for this conviction. It will be pointed out that the notion of regularity, understood as statistical correlation, has a necessary conceptual component not clearly identified before—I shall call this the “conjunctive relation” of the correlated events. On the other hand, it will be argued that there exists no unambiguous, non-circular way in which this relation could be determined. In this regard, the notion of correlation is similar to that of distant simultaneity where the necessary conceptual component is the one-way speed of light, whose value doesn’t seem to be determined by matters of (non-nomic) facts.

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关于远距离相关的概念

当代关于自然法则的争论围绕着休谟的随附性展开，即一切都发生在非经济事实的分布上的论点。本论文的关键要素是这样一种想法，即类似经济学的概念——法律、机会、因果关系等——可以根据非经济学事实的规律性来表达。这个想法的内在是一种默认的信念，即非经济事实的规律性、“恒定连接”确实伴随着非经济事实的分布。本文对这一信念提出了挑战。需要指出的是，规律性的概念，被理解为统计相关性，有一个以前没有明确界定的必要概念成分——我称之为相关事件的“联合关系”。另一方面，有人会争辩说，不存在明确的、可以确定这种关系的非循环方式。在这方面，相关性的概念类似于遥远同时性的概念，其中必要的概念成分是单向光速，其价值似乎不受（非经济）事实的影响。