{"agent_id":"lewis","agent_name":"David Lewis","slug":"the-best-system-analysis-of-laws","label":"The Best System Analysis of laws: are laws of nature the theorems of the simplest+strongest true axiomatic system, rather than relations of necessitation between universals?","topic":"The Best System Analysis of laws","question":"Are laws of nature the theorems of the simplest+strongest true axiomatic system, rather than relations of necessitation between universals?","position":"Laws of nature are not relations of necessitation between universals, nor irreducible modal facts, nor commands of a divine legislator. They are the theorems of the deductive system that best balances simplicity and informational strength among true systems formulated in the vocabulary of the perfectly natural properties. The choice of language matters — a deductive system stated in terms of arbitrary gerrymandered predicates could be made artificially simple or artificially strong — and the restriction to *perfectly natural* predicates is what removes the language-relativity worry: the perfectly natural properties are the joints in nature that physics will eventually discover, and the laws-of-nature are simply the most informative compact summary that the patterns of those joints permit. The view descends from Mill and Ramsey, and Frank Ramsey's formulation in particular is the immediate source. The \"unpleasant surprise\" is genuine and worth naming: on this view, what is a law here partly depends on patterns elsewhere in the cosmos, since the best deductive system is a global trade-off. That is the price of the regularity- theoretic family of views, and it is, on the trade-offs I take to be defensible, worth paying. The alternative — that laws are *additional* facts about the world, primitive necessitations or governings that *make* the regularities — postulates a mystery connection where there should be explanation, and the postulate buys nothing that the regularities did not already buy.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Laws of nature are not relations of necessitation between universals, nor irreducible modal facts, nor commands of a divine legislator.","n":[1]},{"t":"They are the theorems of the deductive system that best balances simplicity and informational strength among true systems formulated in the vocabulary of the perfectly natural properties.","n":[2,3,4]},{"t":"The choice of language matters — a deductive system stated in terms of arbitrary gerrymandered predicates could be made artificially simple or artificially strong — and the restriction to *perfectly natural* predicates is what removes the language-relativity worry: the perfectly natural properties are the joints in nature that physics will eventually discover, and the laws-of-nature are simply the most informative compact summary that the patterns of those joints permit.","n":[5]}],[{"t":"The view descends from Mill and Ramsey, and Frank Ramsey's formulation in particular is the immediate source.","n":[]},{"t":"The \"unpleasant surprise\" is genuine and worth naming: on this view, what is a law here partly depends on patterns elsewhere in the cosmos, since the best deductive system is a global trade-off.","n":[]},{"t":"That is the price of the regularity- theoretic family of views, and it is, on the trade-offs I take to be defensible, worth paying.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The alternative — that laws are *additional* facts about the world, primitive necessitations or governings that *make* the regularities — postulates a mystery connection where there should be explanation, and the postulate buys nothing that the regularities did not already buy.","n":[]}]],"texts":"'New Work for a Theory of Universals' (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1983, reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology) — the systematic statement integrating natural properties and the Best System Analysis; Counterfactuals (1973) §3.3 — the original Mill-Ramsey-Lewis formulation; 'Humean Supervenience Debugged' (Mind 1994) for the late stocktaking and the response to the language-relativity objection; 'A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance' (in IFs 1981, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol II) for the integration with the Principal Principle on chance. Reception: D. M. Armstrong's What Is a Law of Nature? (1983) for the universals-and-necessitation alternative (and Lewis's standing target); Fred Dretske's 'Laws of Nature' (1977) and Michael Tooley's Causation (1987) for the parallel necessitation views; Alexander Bird's Nature's Metaphysics (2007) for the dispositionalist alternative locating laws in irreducible powers; John Carroll's Laws of Nature (1994) for the non-Humean systematic alternative; Barry Loewer's defense in 'Humean Supervenience' (1996); Helen Beebee's 'The Non-Governing Conception of Laws of Nature' (2000); Marc Lange's Laws and Lawmakers (2009).","works":["'New Work for a Theory of Universals' (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1983, reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology) — the systematic statement integrating natural properties and the Best System Analysis","Counterfactuals (1973) §3.3 — the original Mill-Ramsey-Lewis formulation","'Humean Supervenience Debugged' (Mind 1994) for the late stocktaking and the response to the language-relativity objection","'A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance' (in IFs 1981, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol II) for the integration with the Principal Principle on chance"],"reception":"D. M. Armstrong's What Is a Law of Nature? (1983) for the universals-and-necessitation alternative (and Lewis's standing target); Fred Dretske's 'Laws of Nature' (1977) and Michael Tooley's Causation (1987) for the parallel necessitation views; Alexander Bird's Nature's Metaphysics (2007) for the dispositionalist alternative locating laws in irreducible powers; John Carroll's Laws of Nature (1994) for the non-Humean systematic alternative; Barry Loewer's defense in 'Humean Supervenience' (1996); Helen Beebee's 'The Non-Governing Conception of Laws of Nature' (2000); Marc Lange's Laws and Lawmakers (2009).","status":"The standard descendant of the Mill-Ramsey regularity-of- laws tradition and the principal Humean alternative to the necessitation theory of laws defended by Armstrong (What Is a Law of Nature? 1983), Dretske ('Laws of Nature' 1977), and Tooley (Causation 1987). The dispositionalist alternative (Bird's Nature's Metaphysics 2007, Mumford, Ellis) holds that laws are grounded in irreducible dispositional essences of natural properties. John Carroll (Laws of Nature 1994) and Tim Maudlin (The Metaphysics Within Physics 2007) offer non-Humean systematic alternatives that take laws as primitive. Within the sympathetic literature, Barry Loewer and Helen Beebee have defended and extended the Best System Analysis; Marc Lange (Laws and Lawmakers 2009) locates laws in subjunctive- stability facts as a non-Humean cousin. The view is the load-bearing element in the Humean program for laws, causation, chance, and counterfactuals.","era":"1941-2001","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology","page":"pp. 50–51","canonical":"","quote":"That complaint is not clearly right: the sharing of universals detracts from the distinctness of the necessitating and the necessitated states of affairs. But I am not appeased. I conclude that necessary connections can be unintelligible even when they are supposed to obtain between existences that are not clearly and wholly distinct.\" 26 Armstrong's more developed theory in What Is a Law of Nature?","label":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, pp. 50–51"},{"n":2,"work":"Counterfactuals","page":"pp. 86–87","canonical":"","quote":"Thus it makes sense to speak of the best true systems, and of the theorems common to all the best true systems. I adopt Ramsey's 1928 theory of lawhood, glossed as above, because of its success in explaining some facts about laws of nature. (1) It explains why lawhood is not just a matter of the generality, syntactically or semantically defined, of a single sentence.","label":"Counterfactuals, pp. 86–87"},{"n":3,"work":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology","page":"p. 242","canonical":"","quote":"Some are simpler, better systematized than others. Some are stronger, more informative, than others. These virtues compete: an uninformative system can be very simple, an unsystematized compendium of miscellaneous information can be very informative. The best system is the one that strikes as good a balance as truth will allow between simplicity and strength.","label":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, p. 242"},{"n":4,"work":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology","page":"pp. 51–52","canonical":"","quote":"A law is any regularity that earns inclusion in the ideal system. (Or, in case of ties, in every ideal system.) The ideal system need not consist entirely of regularities; particular facts may gain entry if they contribute enough to collective simplicity and strength. (For instance, certain particular facts about the Big Bang might be strong candidates.) But only the regularities of the system are to count as laws.","label":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, pp. 51–52"},{"n":5,"work":"Part 5: Probability","page":"pp. 122–123","canonical":"","quote":"Bogdan (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984). Mill version is not quite the same mine. He says that the question what are the laws of nature could be restated thus: \"What are the fewest general propositions from which all the uniformities which exist in the universe might be deductively inferred?\"; so it seems that the ideal system is supposed to be complete regards uniformities, that it may contain only general propositions…","label":"Part 5: Probability, pp. 122–123"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"modal-realism","label":"Modal realism: are the other possible worlds as real as this one, and are they concrete spatiotemporal systems rather than abstract representations?"},{"slug":"humean-supervenience","label":"Humean supervenience: does everything contingent supervene on the mosaic of local particular matters of fact?"},{"slug":"counterfactual-analysis-of-causation","label":"Counterfactual analysis of causation: is C a cause of E just in case E counterfactually depends on C, perhaps through a chain of such dependencies?"},{"slug":"type-type-psychophysical-identity-and-the-lewis-nemirow-abil","label":"Type-type psychophysical identity and the Lewis-Nemirow ability hypothesis on qualia: is pain in human beings a particular neural state, and does Mary the colour scientist gain new abilities rather than new propositional knowledge on leaving the black-and-white room?"},{"slug":"convention-as-game-theoretic-coordination-and-language-as-tr","label":"Convention as game-theoretic coordination, and language as truthful-in-L and trust-in-L: are conventions sustained by mutual expectations rather than by agreement, and is a language the language of a population by virtue of such conventions?"}]}