Laws of Nature Don't <i>Have</i> Ceteris Paribus Clauses, They <i>Are</i> Ceteris Paribus Clauses

Dumsday, Travis

doi:10.1111/rati.12000

Cited by 26 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…4 Nonetheless, I believe this paper will make its own important contributions to the debate between Aristotelian and Platonist anti-Humeans. The arguments to be presented here are broader than, and differ from, those found in Dumsday 2012and my 2013. Moreover, Dumsday's (2012 arguments are to some extent controversial.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

“…53-4, who tentatively leans towards Platonism. However, unlike Dumsday (2012) and myself (2013), Bird is reluctant to commit whole-heartedly to Platonism, claiming that 'such a view is not mandatory on my account' 2007a, p. 205). 5 To be fair to Dumsday, he does acknowledge that the argument from ceteris paribus laws may not be the only route to nomic Platonism (2012, p. 146).…”

Section: Dispositionalism and The Alleged Elimination Of Governing Lawsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dumsday (2012) and myself (2013) have recently advocated Platonic versions of dispositionalism, although it is worth noting that in my 2013 paper I did not consider whether the view is best thought of as a realist or anti-realist theory about laws. Dumsday reached his Platonic conclusions using considerations about ceteris paribus laws (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Universals, laws, and governance

Tugby

2015

Philos Stud

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. 2 necessitation between categorical universals, is one influential approach, but the dispositional theory of universals is arguably the most popular anti-Humean strategy at present. The dispositional view comes in more than one variety, but the most discussed version says that at least some universals are 'pure powers', which is to say there is nothing more to them than the dispositions they confer (see e.g. the term 'dispositionalism' to refer to this pure powers view, which will be explained further below. 2 Note also that following the authors just listed, I will assume a realist framework of universals for the purposes of this paper. 3 Now, how much does dispositionalism differ from other anti-Humean approaches, such as the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong (DTA) view of laws? Most dispositionalists take the difference to be substantial. Proponents of the DTA view fall into the category of those who favour a thoroughly realist, governing conceptions of laws. This is because they appeal to relations of natural necessitation between categorical properties (universals) which are external and contingent, and which are supposed to explain the behavioural regularities in the world. In contrast, it is typically denied that dispositionalism offers a realist, governing conception of laws even though it does attempt to provide an explanation for behavioural regularities. On the dispositional view, the explanation is provided by the essential natures of the fundamental properties. Natural properties are said to have dispositional essences, which means that, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, possessors of those properties 2 The main alternatives to the 'pure' version of the dispositional theory are the two-sided and identity views. The two sided view says that all natural properties have an inert qualitative (or 'categorical') side as well as a dispositional side, whereas the identity view says that the qualitative and dispositional 'aspects' of properties are one and the same. Interested readers should see Martin (2008) andHeil (2003).3 Unfortunately, I do not have the space in this paper to discuss trope versions of dispositionalism. Incidentally, Ithink that the trope version of the dispositional theory is unworkable and I direct interested readers to my 2013, Section 2. For those who think that trope dispositionalism is a feasible alternative, the main conclusion of this paper may be considered a conditional thesis: that if dispositional properties are universals, then dispositionalism i...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Section: Dispositionalism and The Alleged Elimination Of Governing Lawsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Universals, laws, and governance

Tugby

2015

Philos Stud

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“…DE seems to go hand in hand with a realist conception of properties as irreducible property universals or tropes. Moreover, there are reasons to think that the ontological commitment of DE goes even deeper: Virtually all the accounts of DE in the literature are based on a universals-account of properties, and it has been argued that DE is incompatible with both trope views (Tugby 2013 ) and Aristotelian views of universals (Dumsday 2013 ; Tugby 2013 , 2015 ; Yates 2016 ). If these arguments were sound, this would leave the Platonist view of universals as the sole option—a view that many people in the debate on natural modality find hard to swallow.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nominalist dispositional essentialism

Vogt

2022

Synthese

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Dispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the aim of this paper is to explore a nominalist version of the view, Austere Nominalist Dispositional Essentialism. The core features of the proposed account are that it eschews all kinds of properties (be they universals, tropes, or sets of particulars), takes certain predicative truths as fundamental, and employs the so-called generic notion of essence. As I will argue, the account is significantly closer to the core idea behind Dispositional Essentialism than the only nominalist account in the vicinity of Dispositional Essentialism that has been offered so far—Ann Whittle’s (2009) Causal Nominalism—and is immune to crucial problems that affect this view.

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“…1). For contemporary discussion of this sort of Divine Voluntarism, see Dumsday (2013, 145‐146). Readers may wish to compare with Adams (2018), who argues that Divine Voluntarists should be dispositionalists.…”

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confidence: 99%

Non‐Humeantheories of natural necessity

Hildebrand

2020

Philosophy Compass

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Non-Humean theories of natural necessity invoke modallyladen primitives to explain why nature exhibits lawlike regularities. However, they vary in the primitives they posit and in their subsequent accounts of laws of nature and related phenomena (including natural properties, natural kinds, causation, counterfactuals, and the like). This article provides a taxonomy of non-Humean theories, discusses influential arguments for and against them, and describes some ways in which differences in goals and methods can motivate different versions of non-Humeanism (and, for that matter, Humeanism). In short, this article provides an introduction to non-Humeanism concerning the metaphysics of laws of nature and natural necessity.

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Laws of Nature Don't Have Ceteris Paribus Clauses, They Are Ceteris Paribus Clauses

Cited by 26 publications

References 25 publications

Universals, laws, and governance

Universals, laws, and governance

Nominalist dispositional essentialism

Non‐Humeantheories of natural necessity

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