Best-System Laws, Explanation, and Unification

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean Best Systems Account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this “pragmatic Humean” research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, this chapter argues that they have trouble making sense of certain key features of the practice of fundamental physics. In the author’s view, Humeans can address these issues by paying more attention to the explanatory role of laws. Following this idea, the chapter proposes an account on which what makes a systematization the best is a kind of explanatory power, understood along the lines of the unificationist theory of explanation.

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