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Explicating Lawhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Peter Vallentyne
Peter Vallentyne*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Virginia Commonwealth University
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Abstract

D. M. Armstrong, Michael Tooley, and Fred Dretske have recently proposed a new realist account of laws of nature, according to which laws of nature are objective relations between universals. After criticizing this account, I develop an alternative realist account, according to which (1) the nomic structure of a world is a relation between initial world-histories and world-histories, and (2) a law of nature is a fact that holds solely in virtue of nomic structure (and not, for example, in virtue of past history).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 598 - 613
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I have benefited from the critical comments of David Armstrong, Bryson Brown, Philip Catton, Bill Demopoulos, Chris Gauker, Bill Harper, Patrick Maher, John Metcalfe, Rick Otte, Howard Sobel, Michael Tooley, Bas van Fraassen, and two anonymous referees for this journal. Research on this paper was supported by an internal grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada while I was at the University of Western Ontario.

References

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