Abstract
Traditionally, philosophers have cashed out the distinction between law-like and accidental regularities sharply: a regularity is either law-like, and thereby necessary, or accidental. However, Mitchell (2000) and Lange (2008) have drawn attention to the fact that some law-like regularities come in different degrees of necessity. For instance, the regularity expressed by “all electrons are negatively charged” has a greater degree of necessity than the one expressed by “all mammals are warm-blooded”, even if both of them are true. Moreover, Mitchell argues that the dichotomy between accidental and necessary regularities is unable to capture the complexity of the causal structure of the world. Building on this, I argue that regularities do not only come in different degrees of necessity, but also have different formal features (domain scope, generality, etc.) and ontological features (they have different ontological grounds). All these features matter in order to make sense of the causal complexity of the world. Accordingly, I propose a new conceptual framework to analyze regularities according to three mutually independent levels of analysis: formal features, degree of necessity, and ontological grounds. This new framework can make sense of different degrees of necessity, and it naturally accommodates a wide variety of scientifically-relevant regularities including those typically associated with laws of nature, biological mechanisms, and dispositional properties.
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Notes
This is a potential avenue of interaction between the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language literature on generics. In particular, the literature on generics is relevant to the question of how to understand the logical form of bare generic expressions such as “fragile objects break when struck” (see, for instance, Leslie 2015). This is relevant to the philosophy of science because unveiling the logical form of bare generic expressions (in addition to the logical form of universal generalization, which is usually taken to be well understood) can help us determine which regularities correspond to generic linguistic expressions. Although I think this is an important question, it is only tangential to the project of this paper. I am for the most part assuming that there is some way of translating linguistic or mathematical expressions referring to regularities and focusing on building a conceptual framework that allows us to account for the modal force of regularities, regardless of how strict or universal they are and/or which kind of expression are they captured by (bare generic or universal generalizations).
Let me point out some limitations regarding the analogy between time-slices of possible worlds and world states. Their main differences stem from the fact that we usually take possible worlds (either concrete or ersatz) to play a much more metaphysically substantive role than the role that world states play. Possible worlds usually play the role of the truthmakers for modal truths and are a key part of reductive explanations of modality. In contrast, world states are neither truthmakers nor part of a reductive explanation of modality. This difference in their metaphysical role allows us not to take world states as ontologically seriously as we usually do possible worlds. Accordingly, we conceive world states as abstract objects, parts of a formalism, with no more ontological status than mathematical or logical objects.
Of course, our actual ability to determine this ratio is limited by the amount of modal knowledge that we have regarding the relevant modal functions. However, note that, regardless of our epistemic limitations, the degree of stability of the modal regularity is well defined at the ontological level.
Cartwright and Pemberton (2013), Lipton (1999) go as far as to argue that most or even all laws are ceteris paribus. Giere (1999), Hüttemann (2009, (2014) and Pietroski and Rey (1995) raise similar points in the context of physics, Christie (1994) in the context of chemistry, and Beatty (1995) and Sober (1997) with respect to biology.
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Funding was provided by Fondo para la Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (Grant No. PICT 2014-1741).
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Lanao, X. Regularities, Degrees of Necessity, and Dispositionalism. J Gen Philos Sci 51, 513–524 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-020-09519-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-020-09519-1