No laws and (thin) powers in, no (governing) laws out
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(2021) 11:6
PAPER IN PHILOSOPHY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES
No laws and (thin) powers in, no (governing) laws out Stavros Ioannidis 1
& Vassilis
Livanios 2 & Stathis Psillos 1
Received: 30 January 2020 / Accepted: 7 August 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Non-Humean accounts of the metaphysics of nature posit either laws or powers in order to account for natural necessity and world-order. We argue that such monistic views face fundamental problems. On the one hand, neo-Aristotelians cannot give unproblematic power-based accounts of the functional laws among quantities offered by physical theories, as well as of the place of conservation laws and symmetries in a lawless ontology; in order to capture these characteristics, commitment to governing laws is indispensable. On the other hand, ontologies that entirely exclude some kind of power ascription to worldly entities (such as primitivism) face what we call the Governing Problem: such ontologies do not have the resources to give an adequate account of how laws play their governing role. We propose a novel dualist model, which, we argue, has the resources to solve the difficulties encountered by its two dominant competitors, without inheriting the problems of either view. According to the dualist model, both laws and powers (suitably conceived) are equally fundamental and irreducible to each other, and both are needed in order to give a satisfactory account of the nomological structure of the world. The dualist model constitutes thus a promising alternative to current monistic views in the metaphysics of science. Keywords Laws of nature . Powers . Neo-Aristotelianism . Governing problem .
Dualist model
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Powers in the world of science Guest Editors: Andrea Roselli, Anna Marmodoro
* Stavros Ioannidis [email protected] Vassilis Livanios [email protected] Stathis Psillos [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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European Journal for Philosophy of Science
(2021) 11:6
1 Introduction For many philosophers, certainly in the seventeenth century but also in the latter half of the twentieth, laws underpin the causal fabric of the world and ground and explain the regularity there is in it. They capture a sense of necessity or inevitability in the workings of worldly entities. They are thus being granted modal force; it is this modal force which gives the laws of nature their explanatory power. Laws are relied upon not only to explain (and predict) what actually happens, but also to ground what could or could not have happened (by supporting relevant counterfactual conditionals).1 In the recent literature in philosophy of science, however, there is a call to ‘dethrone’ laws as the source of natural necessity. Two are the dominant tendencies: either to eliminate laws altogether from scientific ontology as a relic of a bygone era, thereby denying them any role in the workings of nature (Cartwright and Ward 2016); or to grant them an anemic
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