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Smoke and Mirrors: A Few Nice Tricks*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Bryson Brown
Bryson Brown
Affiliation:
University of Lethbridge
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Extract

Two aims are at work in James Brown's Smoke and Mirrors: to defend realism against some of its recent detractors, and to expound his own programmatic commitment to a Platonic form of realism. I am sympathetic to his first goal, and dubious about the second, so, as Brown himself predicts, I am enthusiastic about the critical part of the book but critical of his Platonic project. But I will begin this review with a hearty recommendation. Smoke and Mirrors is clear, articulate, perceptive, occasionally provocative, and a healthy antidote to the sceptical pessimism about science that one encounters so often today.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 123 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1999

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References

Notes

1 Due, with some variations, to Armstrong, David, What Is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Dretske, Fred, “Laws of Nature,” Philosophy of Science, 64 (1977)Google Scholar; and Tooley, Michael, Causation: A Realist Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. For a more sceptical view of Tooley, see my review in History and Philosophy of Logic (1990).

2 In fact, it occurs to me that there is one other way in which such laws could constrain our beliefs: if the laws were somehow instantiated in us (our minds?) their very operation in us could causally affect what beliefs about natural laws we form. But I doubt if something like this will turn out to be defensible—and I doubt that it is anything like what Brown has in mind, either. For one thing, Brown holds that uninstantiated laws are just as much laws as instantiated ones. The only saving move I can think of at this point is to distinguish, following Descartes, between formal and objective instantiations of the laws, and allow objective instantiations the power to constrain our beliefs even for laws lacking formal instantiations. But the metaphysics is flying fast and thick at this point; it would probably be best to wait, and let Brown speak for himself on this issue.