Metaphysical Preliminaries

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Carl Hoefer
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Subjective Probabilities ◽  
Principal Principle ◽  
Objective Chance ◽  
The Way

The book argues that objective chance facts are grounded on the existence of patterns in the events found in our world’s Humean Mosaic (HM); and the chance facts so grounded will later be seen to be apt for guiding rational credences (subjective probabilities) in the way captured by the Principal Principle (PP). But what is this HM? What does it contain, and what does it leave out? What understanding of time is presupposed? The rest of the chapter discusses the idea of considering objective chance facts to be primitives of some sort, as most propensity views hold, or to be based on primitively (irreducibly) chancy laws of nature. After an extended attempt to explore what it could mean to postulate primitive chances or chancy laws, it is argued that no acceptable answer can be given. A tacit invocation of PP helps explain why philosophers often think they understand the meaning of primitive chance claims. The invocation of the PP is illegitimate, though, because there is no way to show that a bare primitive posit deserves to guide credence in the way captured by PP.

Physics as an Art Form

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Alvaro De Rújula
Keyword(s):  
General Relativity ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Einstein’S Equations ◽  
Einstein's Equations ◽  
Ockham’S Razor ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Ockham's Razor ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

Beauty and simplicity, a scientist’s view. A first encounter with Einstein’s equations of General Relativity, space-time, and Gravity. Ockham’s Razor. Why the Universe is the way it is: The origin of the laws of Nature.

A Hobbesian Approach to Cruelty and the Rules of War

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-313
Author(s):  
LARRY MAY
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Nature Play ◽  
The Way

AbstractContrary to the way Hobbes has been interpreted for centuries, I will argue that Hobbes laid the groundwork for contemporary international law and for a distinctly moral approach to the rules of war. The paper has the following structure. First, I will explain the role that the laws of nature play in Hobbes's understanding of the state of war. Second, I will explain Hobbes's views of self-preservation and inflicting cruelty. Third, I reconstruct Hobbes's important insight that rationality governs all human affairs, even those concerning war. Fourth, I explicate the idea of cruelty moving from what Hobbes says to a plausible Hobbesian position. Fifth, I address recent philosophical writing on how best to understand the rules of war. Sixth, I then turn to legal discussions of cruelty's place in debates about the laws of war, showing how my Hobbesian approach can ground these laws.

scholarly journals A NEW EPISTEMIC UTILITY ARGUMENT FOR THE PRINCIPAL PRINCIPLE

Episteme ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Pettigrew
Keyword(s):  
True Proposition ◽  
Principal Principle ◽  
Epistemic Utility ◽  
False Proposition ◽  
Objective Chance

AbstractJim Joyce has presented an argument for Probabilism based on considerations of epistemic utility. In a recent paper, I adapted this argument to give an argument for Probablism and the Principal Principle based on similar considerations. Joyce's argument assumes that a credence in a true proposition is better the closer it is to maximal credence, whilst a credence in a false proposition is better the closer it is to minimal credence. By contrast, my argument in that paper assumed (roughly) that a credence in a proposition is better the closer it is to the objective chance of that proposition. In this paper, I present an epistemic utility argument for Probabilism and the Principal Principle that retains Joyce's assumption rather than the alternative I endorsed in the earlier paper. I argue that this results in a superior argument for these norms.

scholarly journals “Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Play The Law: The Principle of the Genre and Stylistic Complexity

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-257
Author(s):  
Viktor I. Humeniuk
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Life Situation ◽  
Artistic Integrity ◽  
The Law ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

The main character of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s play entitled The Law, a young woman eager to have a child, programs her life the way she desires and solves a difficult life situation, as if she were acting as her own life’s stage director. The play is a chamber family play of five characters. However, Vynnychenko’s family collisions always have a global dimension. The play expresses concern about a totalitarian mindset that tends to achieve a higher goal without considering objective laws of nature and society. The genre of the chamber play and the tragic monumentality of the plot are peculiarly combined in the work allotting it with a sort of artistic integrity. A psychologically compelling story ultimately turns into an intellectual drama and reaches the verge of tragedy. A unity of generic and stylistic aspects is to emphasize the element of play, the use of the “theatre-in-the-theatre” method while the theatre is presented as a prerogative not only of art but also of life.

“Laws” and “Theories” in Chemistry Do Not Obey the Rules

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Christie ◽  
John R. Christie
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Theory ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
External World ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Classical Physics ◽  
Small Branch ◽  
The World ◽  
Newton’S Laws ◽  
Ontological Sense ◽  
The Way

Most philosophers’ discussions of issues relating to “laws of nature” and “scientific theories” have concentrated heavily on examples from classical physics. Newton’s laws of motion and of gravitation and the various conservation laws are often discussed. This area of science provides very clear examples of the type of universal generalization that constitutes the widely accepted view of what a law of nature or a scientific theory “ought to be.” But classical physics is just one very small branch of science. Many other areas of science do not seem to throw up generalizations of nearly the same breadth or clarity. The question of whether there are any laws of nature in biology, or of why there are not, has often been raised (e.g., Ghiselin, 1989; Ruse, 1989). In the grand scheme of science, chemistry stands next to physics in any supposed reductive hierarchy, and chemistry does produce many alleged laws of nature and scientific theories. An examination of the characters of these laws and theories, and a comparison with those that arise in classical physics, might provide a broader and more balanced view of the nature of laws and theories and of their role in science. From the outset, we should very carefully define the terms of our discourse. The notion of laws of nature has medieval origin as the edicts of an all-powerful deity to his angelic servants about how the functioning of the world should be arranged and directed. It may be helpful to distinguish three quite different senses in which laws of nature are considered in modern discussions. On occasion, the discussion has become sidetracked and obscure because of conflation and confusion of two or more of these senses. In the first, or ontological, sense, laws of nature may be considered as a simply expressed generalization about the way an external world does operate. Laws of nature are often seen as principles of the way the world works. They are an objective part of the external world, waiting to be discovered. The laws that we have and use may be only approximations of the deeper, true laws of nature.

Schelling on Eternal Choice and the Temporal Order of Nature

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-134
Author(s):  
Brady Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Order ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Moral World ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Basic Features ◽  
The Way

Despite his commitment to the thesis that the essence of the moral world is the same as the essence of nature, Schelling’s philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with naturalism as commonly conceived. He rejects the notion that freedom is nothing but a natural capacity, declaring “the highest goal” of his philosophical pursuit to be the “reduction of the laws of nature to mind, spirit, and will”. This paper explores Schelling’s idealistic conception of nature in Philosophie und Religion and the Freedom Essay by focusing on his reception of Kant’s idea of an “eternal choice” or “intelligible deed” at the root of personality and the way Schelling deploys that idea in developing a theory of time. He sees the natural order’s most basic features, e.g. its spatio-temporal self-externality and the existence of (externally) necessitating “laws of nature” as grounded in an essentially free and morally pertinent action on the part of the individual.

Humean Objective Chance

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-97
Author(s):  
Carl Hoefer
Keyword(s):  
Principal Principle ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
The World ◽  
Objective Chance ◽  
The Right

In this chapter, Humean objective chance (HOC) is laid out and discussed using a number of examples. The theory can be summarized as follows: Chances are constituted by the existence of patterns in the mosaic of events in the world. These patterns are such as to make the adoption of credences identical to the chances rational in the absence of better information, if one is obliged to make guesses or bets concerning the outcomes of chance setups. The full set of objective chances in our world is a Best System composed of many kinds of chances, at various levels of scale and with varying kinds of support in the Humean base. What unifies all the chances is their ability to play the role of guiding credence, as codified in the Principal Principle. The Best System(s) involved in HOC are, as with Lewis, determined by a balance of simplicity and strength and fit; through examples, the right way to understand these notions is sketched. HOC is explicitly pragmatic and is tied to the needs and capacities of limited rational agents.

A Leibnizian Space

Dialogue ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Ian Hacking
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Identity Of Indiscernibles ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

Leibniz said that space and time are well-founded phenomena. Few readers can make much literal sense out of this idea, so I shall describe a small possible world in which it is true. I do not contend that Leibniz had my construction in mind, but I do follow Leibnizian guidelines. The first trick is to reverse the maxim that every monad mirrors the world from its own point of view. Points of view, and hence a space of points, can be constructed from a non-relational account of the perceptions of each monad. But we cannot fabricate space alone. We must build up laws of nature simultaneously. We must also employ a measure of the simplicity of the laws of nature. Moreover we require that, in a literal sense, the perception of each monad is a sum of its Petits perceptions. The identity of indiscernibles, in its application to space, is an automatic consequence of this construction. Although I shall examine only one possible world, there is a general recipe for such constructions, in which none of the above elements can be omitted. This is a striking illustration of the way in which the many different facets of Leibniz's metaphysics are necessarily inter-connected.

scholarly journals Lewisian analysis of objective probability: An origin of the undermining futures

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Nenad Filipovic
Keyword(s):  
David Lewis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Objective Probability ◽  
Subjective Probabilities ◽  
Humean Supervenience ◽  
Principal Principle ◽  
Interpretation Of Probability

David Lewis? interpretation of objective probability has two essential parts: Humean supervenience and Best system of laws. According to his interpretation, probabilities, along with the other nomic phenomena, supervene on the actual facts. Lewis also famously formulated the Principal Principle, which should show the connection between objective and subjective probabilities. However, years later, Hall, Thau and Lewis himself came to conclusion that the principle and Lewis? interpretation of probability are not compatible. The main reason for that is the problem of so called undermining futures: Lewis named the problem ?Big Bad Bug?. A popular way to solve the problem was to change the principal principle. In this article, I will argue that the origin of the problem is not compatibility of the principle and Lewis?s interpretation of probability, but that the problem is in the interpretation itself. Changing the principle, I argue, will not conclusively solve the problem.

scholarly journals Powerful Properties, Powerless Laws

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Demarest
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Choice Point ◽  
Fundamental Ontology ◽  
Categorical Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Independent Features ◽  
David Armstrong ◽  
The Way

A familiar choice-point in the laws of nature debate is whether the laws do any important metaphysical work. Some philosophers, such as Fred Dretske, Michael Tooley, David Armstrong, and Tim Maudlin, argue that the laws have very important metaphysical work to do because the way the world is depends on the laws. Others, such as David Lewis, Barry Loewer, Jonathan Cohen and Craig Callender, and Alexander Bird argue that the laws do not have important metaphysical work to do because the laws depend on the way the world is. According to the traditional formulation of the Best System Account (BSA), the most basic laws of nature (those that are the aim of ideal, final physics) are those propositions which, taken together, constitute the simplest and most informative description of the world. There are two central, but independent, features of this view. One is that the laws are mere systematizations of the fundamental ontology; they are not metaphysically ‘weighty’ and do not govern. The other is that the laws depend upon only categorical properties and relations. In this chapter I explore the consequences of accepting the first feature while rejecting the second. That is, I explore a best sys-tem account of laws that depends upon potencies. (For the purposes of this chapter, I suppose the fundamental properties are potencies: properties that are essentially dispositional.) I argue that a BSA grounded in potencies is preferable to a BSA grounded in categorical properties. Laws of nature, on this view, are those propositions that constitute the simplest and most informative description of potencies.

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