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Tooley’s account of the necessary connection between law and regularity

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Abstract

Fred Dretske, Michael Tooley, and David Armstrong accept a theory of governing laws of nature according to which laws are atomic states of affairs that necessitate corresponding natural regularities. Some philosophers object to the Dretske/Tooley/Armstrong theory on the grounds that there is no illuminating account of the necessary connection between governing law and natural regularity. In response, Michael Tooley has provided a reductive account of this necessary connection in his book Causation (1987). In this essay, I discuss an improved version of his account and argue that it fails. First, the account cannot be extended to explain the necessary connection between certain sorts of laws—namely, probabilistic laws and laws relating structural universals—and their corresponding regularities. Second, Tooley’s account succeeds only by (very subtly) incorporating primitive necessity elsewhere, so the problem of avoiding primitive necessity is merely relocated.

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Notes

  1. They wish to avoid (or minimize) modal primitives, but, this is not to say that they endorse something like Humean supervenience.

  2. I would like to thank Michael Tooley for graciously allowing me to discuss this speculative proposal here. He proposed an account of this sort in correspondence, but, as he has not endorsed this version in print, my development of it should not be taken to represent his views.

  3. Note that by (5), F&G makes all of its instances resemble in both respects.

  4. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for discovering this shortcoming in SPEC2 and for suggesting the resolution employed here.

  5. Another option is to introduce a “longer” conjunctive universal D&E&F&G. This proposal is subject to exactly the same problem as the proposal that F&G = E&F = D&F, so I won’t consider it separately.

  6. Note that this relative “reduction” in the a priori probability of Governing Humeanism won’t confer any explanatory advantages over Governing Non-Humeanism.

  7. Lewis rejects the account for essentially this same reason, regardless of whether universals are Platonic or Aristotelian: “So if the structural universal methane is to be an isomorph of the molecules that are its instances, it must have the universal hydrogen as a part not just once, but four times over. Likewise for bonded, since each molecule has four bonded pairs of atoms. But what can it mean for something to have a part four times over? What are there four of? There are not four of the universal hydrogen, or of the universal bonded; there is only one. The pictorial conception as I have presented it has many virtues, but consistency is not among them” (Lewis 1986, p. 34).

  8. This is of particular relevance to Tooley (1987), since causal laws are temporally extended on his own account.

  9. See Schaffer (2010, Sect. 2.2) and Maudlin (2007, pp. 53–61) for some relevant background on entangled systems. I should note that Maudlin’s interpretation of these systems places independent pressure on Humeanism.

  10. I have returned to the more cumbersome version of the definition because it allows for precise placement of the relevant modal operators.

References

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michael Tooley and an anonymous referee from Philosophical Studies for their very helpful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this essay.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, 361 Savery Hall, Box 353350, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Tyler Hildebrand

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  1. Tyler Hildebrand
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Correspondence to Tyler Hildebrand.

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Hildebrand, T. Tooley’s account of the necessary connection between law and regularity. Philos Stud 166, 33–43 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0023-4

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