Special Sciences, Conspiracy and the Better Best System Account of Lawhood

Abstract

An important obstacle to lawhood in the special sciences is the worry that such laws would require metaphysically extravagant conspiracies among fundamental particles. How, short of conspiracy, is this possible? In this paper we'll review a number of strategies that allow for the projectibility of special science generalizations without positing outlandish conspiracies: non-Humean pluralism, classical MRL theories of laws, and Albert and Loewer's theory. After arguing that none of the above fully succeed, we consider the conspiracy problem through the lens of our preferred view of laws, an elaboration of the MRL view that we call the Better Best System (BBS) theory. BBS offers a picture on which, although all events supervene on a fundamental level, there is no one unique locus of projectibility; rather there are a large number of loci corresponding to the different areas (ecology, economics, solid-state chemistry, etc.) in which there are simple and strong generalizations to be made. While we expect that some amount of conspiracy-fear-inducing special science projectibility is inevitable given BBS, we'll argue that this is unobjectionable. It follows from BBS that the laws of any particular special or fundamental science amount to a proper subset of the laws. From this vantage point, the existence of projectible special science generalizations not guaranteed by the fundamental laws is not an occasion for conspiracy fantasies, but a predictable fact of life in a complex world.This work is fully collaborative; the authors are listed alphabetically.

The epistemology of hedged laws

“…For a best-system competition that takes no heed of the approximative or idealized nature of many empirical law-like generalizations will risk classifying as non-laws core scientific principles contained in every textbook. (The same problem obtains, mutatis mutandis, for the very similar proposals of Braddon Mitchell (2001) and Callender and Cohen (2010).) Surely, it is reasonable for philosophers of science to adopt the desideratum that any theoretical account of laws 'should make it plausible that laws of nature are the truths which science aims to discover ' (Van Fraassen, 1989, p. 55), at least in the long run.…”

Do Statistical Laws Solve the ‘Problem of Provisos’?

“…The most urgent trouble with adopting this strategy is that there is no positive evidence to believe that the mentaculus does in fact entail all of the required special science laws (about correlations). Although one might grant that Albert and Loewer convincingly show that the second law of thermodynamics is a theorem of the mentaculus, the critics correctly insist that it is an entirely open question whether this success can be extended to laws of the special sciences in general (Cohen and Callender [2010: 437-439]; Weslake forthcoming). Therefore, the mentaculus account cannot be used to interpret idealized special science generalizations as vacuous statements about correlations.…”

Better Best Systems - Too Good To Be True

“…However, this is not necessarily the case, because there might still be ‘systematic inter‐theoretic relationships’ between the best systems of different sciences (for instance, relationships such as theory reduction, supervenience of one discipline's Humean mosaic on the mosaic of another discipline another, grounding, etc.). Cohen and Callender, for instance, emphatically endorse the claim that – “if we have reason to believe in anything in science” – macroscopic physical properties (and other special science properties) supervene on microscopic features of physical systems (Callender and Cohen , 432). Moreover, Cohen and Callender explicitly reject Cartwright's view of a “dappled world” whose core is the denial of such “systematic inter‐theoretic relationships”, particularly, the denial of supervenience relations (Ib., 431).…”