The Metaphysical Necessity of Natural Laws
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this paper I will defend the thesis that natural laws are metaphysically necessary, i.e. obtain in every possible world. Metaphysical necessity and possibility are the unrestricted modalities in the semantical interpretation of the modal logic system S5, which I adopt in this paper. I shall defend the following definition of a law of nature: (D 1) L is a natural law if and only if (i) L obtains in every possible world (ii) L is synthetic (iii) L is a posteriori (iv) L is a universal generalization (v) L mentions no times, places or particular things or events. (vi) L entails corresponding counterfactuals. Since I am interested in defending the least widely accepted of these conditions, condition (i), I shall not enter the debates about the other five conditions. I begin by defending condition (i) against five objections (section 2). Following this, I show that the theory that laws obtain contingently encounters three problems that are solved by the theory that laws are metaphysically necessary (section 3). In section 3, I criticize the regularity theory of natural laws and the universals theory of Armstrong, Dretske and Tooley, and also show how the metaphysical theory solves the "inference problem" that Van Fraasse~ (1989) posed for any theory of natural laws.
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