Abstract
In this paper, we show that it is not a conceptual truth about laws of nature that they are immutable (though we are happy to leave it as an open empirical question whether they do actually change once in a while). In order to do so, we survey three popular accounts of lawhood—(Armstrong-style) necessitarianism, (Bird-style) dispositionalism and (Lewis-style) ‘best system analysis’—and expose the extent, as well as the philosophical cost, of the amendments that should be enforced in order to leave room for the possibility of changing laws.
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Notes
In this respect, we share the spirit of a similar endeavor undertaken by Cartwright and Merlussi (2018) relative to the contingency that laws possibly allow.
In this paper we concentrate on dynamical laws. As in physics, we suppose these are more fundamental than the non-dynamical laws.
There are other forms of governism that seem more compatible with changing laws, for example, natural laws as divine decrees or certain kinds of primitivism about laws. Since our goal is to challenge the assumption that laws cannot change, we decided to treat a kind of governism that is the less welcoming to changing laws, on this point see Hildebrand (2018).
Of course, if one defends a static conception of change, it is maybe not a fatal flaw, even if defenders of the static conception of change usually distinguish spatial and temporal difference. We also put aside all complications about time that could come if the general theory of relativity is true.
This could remind the reader of the notion of ‘cosmic epochs’ discussed by Armstrong (1983).
A similar argument can be found in Yudell (2013).
Principles of symmetries when understood as meta-laws raise a similar difficulty.
More specifically, there are no worlds in which the dispositional property and its stimulus exist and co-occurrences of instances of them are not accompanied by an instance of the manifestation property. The following discussion does not depend on whether the relevant properties exist in all possible worlds or only in some worlds.
Tugby (2013) argues that not all dispositional properties need have stimulus conditions. We set aside such cases here.
To keep the prose simple, we shall from now on refer to ‘wires’ as shorthand for the instantiation of the property of being a wire.
We are not endorsing this claim of metaphysical necessity, but allowing it for purposes of argument.
In world W, the modulus of elasticity for a given material is a fundamental constant. It is not the result of the internal composition of the material.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Coulomb’s Law is often considered not to be a fundamental law but a consequence of the more general Gauss’s Law.
In the possible worlds approach it seems to be an implicit assumption that the laws of a given world are fixed, although it would be easy to adapt the approach to relax that assumption.
Takho’s paper also arrives at the conclusion that there are some metaphysically necessary laws and some metaphysically contingent laws, but using an ontology of fundamental natural kinds to argue for that conclusion.
As of now, the evidence for temporal or spatial variations in the fine structure constant is inconclusive.
We could have added realism to the list, insofar as, primarily, BS-laws are supposed to be things in the world, namely regularities or patterns among facts of HM. It is only secondarily that they are captured by formal devices that allow for organizing knowledge of the world (Earman 1984; Ramsey’s epistemological version of the BSA is perhaps a notable exception to this).
This is true with respect to traditional, synchronic emergence. Humeanism is actually more tolerant with diachronic emergence (Sartenaer 2019).
When t is set up at the origin of W, Ft captures W’s initial conditions. As it appears, we are inclined to stick to Lewis’ letter here, by (i) allowing for factual statements to figure into the best system—for they certainly provide the system with a boost in strength against a not too drastic sacrifice in simplicity—and (ii) not considering these statements as lawful (Lewis 1983, p.367). Recent Lewisian thinkers are prone to accept (i) but deny (ii), that is, they consider statements of facts about a world’s initial conditions as worthy of figuring in the best system while being themselves lawful (Albert 2000; Loewer 2012). Though it is a matter of possible controversy that the BSA actually has the resources to draw a distinction between laws and boundary conditions (Hicks 2018), this will not keep us busy any further here. It should also be noted that the virtue of fit is left aside in the present discussion as the worlds at stake are deterministic.
At some point, Lewis himself seemed to have endorsed such a view in spite of the supposed universality of BS-laws (Lewis 1973, p.75).
Although in the example of world Wc the nomological structure is purely temporal, it could well be (rather or also) spatial.
It has recently been suggested that one way of breaking free of the immutability of BS-laws is to embrace a growing block universe ontology (see for instance Backmann’s (2016) ‘open-future Humeanism’ or Smart’s (2018) ‘hypertemporal Humeanism’). Even more, the resulting account of changing BS-laws would be ‘true[r] to Hume’ (Smart 2018, p.109). Though we are of course sympathetic to these endeavors, we also think that their commitment to a growing block universe ontology is (i) risky—for the combination of the view with Humeanism is notoriously unstable (Hüttemann 2014; Briggs and Forbes 2017)—and, more importantly perhaps, (ii) unnecessary for the sole sake of securing the laws’ mutability. As we have seen, it is indeed enough for BS-laws to change that there are adjacent regions of HM (as a block universe) in which the laws differ (especially when the relation of adjacency can be purely temporal, as in the case of Wc). As such, it appears an unnecessary metaphysical inflation to consider that changing BS-laws must also pop into existence at a certain turning point in time.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Michael Hicks, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, Andreas Hüttemann and Christian Loew for helpful comments and/or discussions on earlier versions of (parts of) this paper, as well as the audiences of the Köln Kolloquium Wissenschaftstheorie, the Third International Conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science (GWP) and the Francqui Chair lectures at KU Leuven, where parts of this paper have been presented. Olivier Sartenaer gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Paul Humphreys would like to acknowledge a 3 Cavaliers grant from the University of Virginia.
Funding
Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship (Olivier Sartenaer) 3 Cavaliers grant (University of Virginia; Paul Humphreys).
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Sartenaer, O., Guay, A. & Humphreys, P. What Price Changing Laws of Nature?. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 11, 12 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00327-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00327-4