Dispositional essentialism and the necessity of laws

Abstract

It used to be assumed, by Humeans and non-Humeans alike, that laws of nature are contingent. Indeed allowing for contingency was widely taken to be a desideratum on the acceptability of any account of natural laws. However, nomic necessitarians argue that even if laws of nature are logically contingent (so that putative law statements cannot be analytic), they are metaphysically necessary. Their arguments are typically, though not always, founded on dispositional essentialism.1 Dispositional essentialism about a property is the view that its essence is dispositional: the dispositions it confers are what make the property what it is (Bird 2007a: 44). The argument for nomic necessitarianism is roughly as follows (see for instance Mumford 2004: 103-4). Suppose it is a law that all Fs are Gs (e.g. that all salt dissolves in water), but that the nomic status is contingent. On a non-Humean account of laws like Armstrong's, although P-ness necessitates G-ness, the relation of nomic necessitation between F and G does not hold with metaphysical necessity: there are possible worlds (governed by different laws) in which some Fs are not Gs, and others in which no Fs are Gs (see Armstrong 1983: Chapter 11). But why should we think that what we have called Fs in these worlds are genuinely Fs? In order to be Fs they must be instances of the very same property that (nomically) necessitates G-ness under the laws of nature as

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.