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Wilson's Laws and Other Worlds*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Robert M. Martin
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University

Extract

I like the idea behind this book. It is an empiricist alternative to the powerful and influential contemporary rationalist position on scientific law, causality, and counterfactuals, associated with Chisholm and David Lewis, which “takes its inspiration from modal logic and set theory [and] involves … an assumption of non-truth-functional connectives to define unanalyzable natural necessities, or defines such connectives and such necessities in terms of an ontology of possible worlds”. Wilson's views, springing from Hume and Nelson Goodman, involve no unobservables such as natural necessities or possible worlds, but are based instead on good old Humean laws of constant conjunction. How lovely if Wilson could pull this off!

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

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References

1 Ibid., ix.

2 Ibid., 18.

3 Lewis, David, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).Google Scholar

4 Wilson, , Laws, 20ff.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 227.

6 Ibid., 265.