An indifference principle says that your credences should be distributed uniformly over each of the possibilities you recognise. A chance deference principle says that your credences should be aligned with the chances. My thesis is that if we are anti-Humeans about chance, then these two principles are incompatible. Anti-Humeans think that it is possible for the actual frequencies to depart from the chances. As long as you recognise possibilities like this, you cannot both spread your credences evenly and defer to the chances. I discuss some weaker forms of indifference which will allow anti-Humeans to defer to the chances.

Humeans identify the laws of nature with universal generalizations that systematize rather than govern the particular matters of fact. Humeanism is frequently accused of circularity: laws explain their instances, but Humean laws are, in turn, grounded by those instances. Unfortunately, this argument trades on controversial assumptions about grounding and explanation that Humeans routinely reject. However, recently an ostensibly semantic circularity objection has been offered, which seeks to avoid reading such assumptions into the Humean view. This paper argues that the new semantic version tacitly relies on the familiar metaphysical one and, therefore, it ultimately brings nothing new to the table.

This article is concerned with the relationship between scientific practice and the metaphysics of laws of nature and natural properties. I begin by examining an argument by Michael Townsen Hicks and Jonathan Schaffer (‘Derivative Properties in Fundamental Laws,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2017) that an important feature of scientific practice—namely, that scientists sometimes invoke non-fundamental properties in fundamental laws—is incompatible with metaphysical theories according to which laws govern. I respond to their argument by developing an epistemology for governing laws that is grounded in scientific practice. This epistemology is of general interest for non-Humean theories of laws, for it helps to explain our epistemic access to non-Humean theoretical entities such as governing laws or fundamental powers.