Abstract
One of the main challenges confronting Humean accounts of natural law is that Humean laws appear to be unable to play the explanatory role of laws in scientific practice. The worry is roughly that if the laws are just regularities in the particular matters of fact (as the Humean would have it), then they cannot also explain the particular matters of fact, on pain of circularity. Loewer (Philoso Stud 160:115–137, 2012) has defended Humeanism, arguing that this worry only arises if we fail to distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanations. However, Lange (Philoso Stud 165:255–261, 2013, Synthese 195:1337–1353, 2018) has argued that scientific and metaphysical explanations are linked by a transitivity principle, which would undercut Loewer’s defense and re-ignite the circularity worry for the Humean. I argue here that the Humean has antecedent reasons to doubt that there are any systematic connections between scientific and metaphysical explanations. The reason is that the Humean should think that scientific and metaphysical explanation have disparate aims, and therefore that neither form of explanation is beholden to the other in its pronouncements about what explains what. Consequently, the Humean has every reason to doubt that Lange’s transitivity principle obtains.
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Notes
Armstrong expresses a similar worry in his (1983, p. 102).
Two clarifications. First, the claim is not that any fact “covered” by a law is explained by it. For example, it would be incorrect to say that the Lorentz force law, together with the strength of the magnetic field and the magnitude of the Lorentz force experienced by the electron, explains why the electron has the charge that it does. (One of the main problems with the DN model was its inability to account for this sort of explanatory asymmetry.) Second, we might just as well have considered the law explaining the regularity as a whole, but for simplicity I have focused on the explanation of the particular event e that is a part of that regularity.
Of course, this regularity will typically have to exhibit additional characteristics in order to count as a law. For example, according to the BSA, it must be part of a systematization of all the particular matters of fact that best balances simplicity and strength.
That is not to say that all cases of self-explanation are unacceptable. Perhaps in some outré time travel scenarios, for example, we would have to admit that self-explanation can occur. But surely we should not allow that self-explanation is ubiquitous, as it would appear to be on the Humean view. After all, our choice of the Lorentz force law, and the event e, was relatively arbitrary. The same considerations would hold no matter which law we chose, and no matter which instance we picked. [Lange (2018, p. 1338) also allows that the prohibition on self-explanation may be violated in some exotic cases.]
Lange actually frames his principle in terms of grounding rather than metaphysical explanation, but it makes the connection with Loewer’s argument most explicit if we frame it in terms of metaphysical explanation.
Another noteworthy development of the BSA is the “Better Best System Account” of Cohen and Callender (2009). The developments I am focusing on here are, I think, largely compatible with the Better Best System view, though they focus on different aspects of the Humean metaphysics.
C.f. Section 3 of Dorst (2018) for a more comprehensive discussion of this point.
It is worth clarifying that Dellsén thinks IBE only functions as a guide to comparative, not absolute, probability values.
One might worry that a comparison of \(H_1\) and \(H_2\) on explanatory grounds is illegitimate because one entails the other. In this vein, Dellsén (2016) argues that the hypotheses used in any particular application of IBE ought to be incompatible. But even if that is correct, precision can hardly be regarded as truth-conducive. Imagine comparing \(H_1\) with \(H_3\): My neighbor’s sprinkler system sprayed my yard last night for exactly 3 h, 27 min, and 14 s. As explanations of the wetness of the lawn, \(H_1\) and \(H_3\) are incompatible, but the increased precision of \(H_3\) drags down its probability.
On the other hand, maybe the suggestion is that rival hypotheses in an application of IBE must be, in some sense, “complete” explanations, in that they have to be both incompatible and equally precise. (Indeed, this seems closer in spirit to Dellsén’s own suggestion.) In that case, it is hard to see how precision could still be an explanatory virtue, since all hypotheses compared in any application of IBE will be equally precise.
van Fraassen (1980, p. 86) gives a similar explanation of the value of unification, suggesting that the aim of empirical adequacy requires our theories to be able to cover phenomena on the borders of their subdomains.
Additionally, the current state of fundamental physics may provide support for this predictive conception of the value of unification. Specifically, there are radically different physical theories governing Planck-scale and high energy regimes, and these theories seem to generate incompatible predictions about events in the early universe. The search for a grand unified theory may then be viewed as arising, not out of a mere preference for the aesthetic value of unification, but out of the desire to have a theory that accurately predicts the behavior of events in domains where our current theories generate incompatible predictions. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this point.
It is worth noting that, in principle, the Humean has another option open to her: she can view the explanatory virtues as only conducive to predictive utility, and not thereby also truth-conducive. On this picture, IBE is inherently concerned with fashioning theories that are predictively useful to us, without any regard to whether or not they are true.
While it is open to the Humean to adopt this conception of the explanatory virtues, I do not think it comports well with the overall Humean picture. For example, according to the BPSA, the Humean views the standards of lawhood as truth-conducive because they are constitutive of lawhood. She does not say that these standards help produce principles that are predictively useful to us, though they are not a guide to the truths about the laws. (Indeed, this latter view begins to sound rather anti-Humean.) So it seems to me that if the Humean wants to be consistent in the way she treats both (i) our epistemic standards for lawhood, and (ii) the explanatory virtues, she should view them both as fundamentally prediction-conducive, and as derivatively truth-conducive. (Thanks to Marc Lange and an anonymous referee for raising this point.)
This point should be especially salient to philosophers, of all people. Would that philosophy commanded the massive societal investment that something like physics does.
It might seem that I am cheating by not proposing a specific conception of the fundamental aim of metaphysical explanation. After all, I am defending a metaphysical view in Humeanism, so shouldn’t I have a view about the aim of metaphysical explanation that supports that view?
Whether this is true depends on whether our first-order metaphysical views require second-order metametaphysical views for their justification. If that were the case, then indeed it would be unfair of me to defend a first-order view like Humeanism without also advocating a metametaphysical view about the aims of metaphysical explanation that could justify it. But I prefer not to think of our first-order metaphysical theorizing as wholly dependent on metametaphysical foundations. For this seems to launch an infinite regress: if our first-order views need grounding in second-order views, then don’t those second-order views need grounding in third-order views—shouldn’t our metametaphysics be justified by a metametametaphysics—and so on ad infinitum?
Rather, I prefer to think of our first-order metaphysical views and our metametaphysical views as jointly determined by a process of reflective equilibrium. Whether we find a particular first-order view attractive will in part depend on whether it accords nicely with our metametaphysical inclinations. But likewise, whether we find a metametaphysical view attractive can also depend on whether it accords nicely with our preferred first-order theories. Thus, one does not require a fully articulated metametaphysical view about the fundamental aim of metaphysics before one can advocate a first-order metaphysical view like Humeanism. (Though this is perfectly compatible with knowing that the fundamental aim of metaphysics is not predictive.) Rather, we may let our second-order views about the fundamental aim of metaphysics be determined by what strikes us as good first-order metaphysics. Spoils to the victor.
Case in point: physicists tend not to be alarmed by the fact that textbook formulations of quantum mechanics treat the measurement process as fundamentally different than the rest of the dynamics. Metaphysicians, on the other hand, view this disjunctivity as unacceptable in a fundamental theory of the world, and have long searched for resolutions to the so-called “measurement problem.” Perhaps the difference here is explained by the different explanatory aims of physicists and metaphysicians.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this response.
Bhogal (forthcoming) likewise argues that the Humean should distinguish between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality. He also suggests a similar response to the explanatory circularity problem to the one proposed here, namely that the Humean should distinguish between the aims of metaphysics and the aims of science. His proposal is interesting, and differs from mine in a number of respects. I leave a comparison of our proposals for future work.
Of course, this does not preclude the possibility of “tuning” IBE differently, so that we can use it for metaphysics. My point is just that we ought not to use it indiscriminately, without careful consideration of whether it has been adjusted for our purposes.
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Dorst, C. Humean laws, explanatory circularity, and the aim of scientific explanation. Philos Stud 176, 2657–2679 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1145-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1145-0