What, ontologically speaking, are best system laws? Should the laws of the best system account be identified with sentences, or propositions, or perhaps something else? These questions differ from more familiar questions about which criteria we should use to pick out the best system laws: regardless of whether laws are picked out using simplicity, informativeness, tractability, predictability, perfect naturalness, or whatever, there remains the question of what, ontologically, the best system laws are. But very little has been written on this issue; and what has been written is often ambiguous. So in this paper, we present and evaluate three ontological options for best system laws: taking them to be sentences, unstructured propositions, and structured propositions. Surprisingly, the two most cited options—sentences and unstructured propositions—face significant problems. Defenders of the best system account might want to take seriously the idea that best system laws are structured propositions.

Recent proposals in theoretical cosmology have important implications for a longstanding debate in the philosophy of science about laws of nature. In this paper, we examine a no-boundary proposal, a series of early symmetry-breaking transitions, and a holographically emergent dynamical law from three-dimensional entanglement relations. We argue that these proposals, while speculative, are best understood within the Humean tradition of laws of nature, according to which laws describe, rather than govern the events within the universe.

There is a popular view in metaphysics: a mental state exists at a time and depends on a brain state at that time. This is difficult to reconcile with a central claim from special relativity: what exists at a time depends on an arbitrary foliation of spacetime. Together, these seem to suggest that brain states and their accompanying mental states depend on arbitrary foliations of spacetime. I argue that a further implication is that there could be rogue mental states and, worse, rogue persons that overlap with an ordinary person, but that are nonetheless introspectively inaccessible to that person. I go on to argue that functional and intelligibility requirements allow us to privilege a person's rest foliation. I conclude that most rogue mental states are unintelligible and that rogue persons are exceedingly rare.

Evolution, conceived broadly as encompassing both biological and abiological systems, generates novel structures and phenomena that are seemingly different, in important ways, from what came before. While it is always possible, in theory, to describe complex systems using the language of the most basic physical entities and laws, it is almost never practical to do so. When novel systems arise, their behaviour may be better explained and predicted using new sets of properties and principles. How can we understand this universal aspect of evolution-that is, the tendency of a system to produce astonishing novelty? Here, we introduce two new concepts: selective funnelling and state-space expansion. Together, these processes describe the mechanisms by which an evolving system shifts from one functional fitness landscape to another. During selective funnelling, non-equilibrium features from the previous level are 'locked in', promoting the increase of functional information in evolving systems with time. A state-space expansion event is characterized by significant changes in components of relevance, driving forces for exploring combinatorial possibilities and/or selection mechanisms. Together, selective funnelling and state-space expansion provide an abstract framework for understanding a plethora of diverse origin events, trends of increasing 'complexity' in the universe and the challenging phenomenon of 'emergence'.

Recently, philosophers have argued that the laws of Lewis’s Best System Analysis (BSA) are not pragmatically useful. In this paper, I argue that these criticisms are substantive only because the BSA laws are characterized independently of their pragmatic roles. It is important to maintain the distinction between what the laws are and what the laws should do if we are to engage in the traditional, metaphysical debates found in the laws literature. While it is plausible that usefulness is an important criterion by which we judge the success of a Humean best system, I argue that we should not take usefulness to constitute a Humean best system. In response to the shortcomings of Lewis’s BSA, many authors have developed new “pragmatic” Humean best system accounts. I argue that these accounts are not characterized independently of the useful roles they are supposed to play for us. This leaves them vulnerable to objections that they may be stipulating the virtues they claim to explain, or they may fail to be Humean best system accounts at all.

Large volumes of liquid water transiently existed on the surface of Mars more than 3 billion years ago. Much of this water is hypothesized to have been sequestered in the subsurface or lost to space. We use rock physics models and Bayesian inversion to ...

Abstract For Humeans, many facts—even ones intuitively ‘about’ particular, localized macroscopic parts of the world—turn out to depend on surprisingly global fundamental bases. This chapter investigates some counterintuitive consequences of this picture. Many counterfactuals whose antecedents describe intuitively localized, non-actual states of affairs nevertheless end up involving wide-ranging implications for the global, embedding Humean mosaic. The case of self-undermining chances is a familiar example of this. The chapter examines that example in detail and argues that popular existing strategies such as ‘holding the laws fixed as laws’ or ‘holding the laws fixed as true’ are of no help. Interestingly, it shows how a new proposal that draws on the resources of the Mentaculus can yield the right results—but only on the assumption that the Humean can make cross-world identifications. The chapter goes on to argue that the Humean cannot make such identifications, and concludes that the root of this trouble is deeper, and its reach broader, than the familiar cases suggest. It is very much an open question whether the Humean has sufficient resources to properly conceptualize macroscopic objects or to analyze these ‘local’ counterfactuals.

Physical laws-such as the laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics-codify the general behavior of varied macroscopic natural systems across space and time. We propose that an additional, hitherto-unarticulated law is required to characterize familiar macroscopic phenomena of our complex, evolving universe. An important feature of the classical laws of physics is the conceptual equivalence of specific characteristics shared by an extensive, seemingly diverse body of natural phenomena. Identifying potential equivalencies among disparate phenomena-for example, falling apples and orbiting moons or hot objects and compressed springs-has been instrumental in advancing the scientific understanding of our world through the articulation of laws of nature. A pervasive wonder of the natural world is the evolution of varied systems, including stars, minerals, atmospheres, and life. These evolving systems appear to be conceptually equivalent in that they display three notable attributes: 1) They form from numerous components that have the potential to adopt combinatorially vast numbers of different configurations; 2) processes exist that generate numerous different configurations; and 3) configurations are preferentially selected based on function. We identify universal concepts of selection-static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation-that underpin function and drive systems to evolve through the exchange of information between the environment and the system. Accordingly, we propose a "law of increasing functional information": The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.

There is a long tradition of preferring local theories to ones that posit lawful or causal influence at a spacetime distance. In this paper, we argue against this preference. We argue that nonlocality is scientifically unobjectionable and that nonlocal theories can be known. Scientists can gather evidence for them and confirm them in much the same way that they do for local theories. We think these observations point to a deeper constraint on scientific theorizing and experimentation: the (quasi-) isolation of causal or lawful influence. We argue that this requirement ought to replace the locality desideratum in science. We then explore the possibility that the order of explanation has been reversed: perhaps it is isolatable influence that determines what counts as local in the first place.

The laws of nature are central to our understanding of the world. And while there is often broad agreement about the technical formulations of the laws, there can be sharp disagreement about the metaphysical nature of the laws. For instance, the Newtonian laws of nature can be stated and analyzed by appealing to a set of possible worlds. Yet, some philosophers argue the worlds are mere notational devices, while others take them to be robust, concrete entities in their own right. In this paper, I use a recent view of laws called the Mentaculus as a case study to illustrate the wide variety of metaphysical pictures that can accompany such a view. I conclude that the technical features of the laws -- typically (though not always) given to us by practicing scientists -- are compatible with many different metaphysical foundations.

This paper introduces a new way for moral naturalists to explain our moral knowledge. Several of the most pressing challenges for moral naturalism are in moral epistemology, and this paper shows how those problems can be solved. The ambition is to increase the overall plausibility of any kind of moral naturalism, by reducing the costs that the naturalist incurs in moral epistemology. Natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology are impressively successful. Their success convinces many of us that there are physical, chemical, and biological facts that are independent of and more fundamental than our methods for discovering them.1 Moreover, it’s natural to take their success to suggest a general strategy for establishing a domain D of facts as independent of and more fundamental than our methods for investigating them. The strategy is to show that the D-facts are saliently similar to physical, chemical and biological facts. Since we say that physics, chemistry, and biology are natural sciences, it’s natural to say that a proponent of this strategy is a naturalist about the D-facts. Many of us believe that moral facts are independent of and more fundamental than our methods for discovering them. The naturalist strategy is an attractive way to vindicate this belief. It’s thus unsurprising that recent metaethics has seen a broad range of naturalist views. One way to be a naturalist is to hold that the real definition of moral properties includes only natural properties. Another way to be a naturalist to to hold that moral properties are reducible to natural properties. And yet another way is to hold that moral properties are composed of natural properties. And there are other options, too.2 Not everyone, of course – not Bas van Fraassen (1980). I intend to be ecumenical in my characterization of naturalists, including both reductive and non-reductive naturalists; for illuminating discussion, see McPherson (2015). There are also lots of options about which natural facts the naturalist should use – whether to use facts about our desires, as Mark Schroeder (2007) suggests, or facts about welfare, as Peter Railton (1986) and Richard Boyd (1988) suggest, or teleological facts about natural life form of our species, as Philippa Foot (2001) and Michael Thompson (2012) suggest.

A familiar choice-point in the laws of nature debate is whether the laws do any important metaphysical work. Some philosophers, such as Fred Dretske, Michael Tooley, David Armstrong, and Tim Maudlin, argue that the laws have very important metaphysical work to do because the way the world is depends on the laws. Others, such as David Lewis, Barry Loewer, Jonathan Cohen and Craig Callender, and Alexander Bird argue that the laws do not have important metaphysical work to do because the laws depend on the way the world is. According to the traditional formulation of the Best System Account (BSA), the most basic laws of nature (those that are the aim of ideal, final physics) are those propositions which, taken together, constitute the simplest and most informative description of the world. There are two central, but independent, features of this view. One is that the laws are mere systematizations of the fundamental ontology; they are not metaphysically ‘weighty’ and do not govern. The other is that the laws depend upon only categorical properties and relations. In this chapter I explore the consequences of accepting the first feature while rejecting the second. That is, I explore a best sys-tem account of laws that depends upon potencies. (For the purposes of this chapter, I suppose the fundamental properties are potencies: properties that are essentially dispositional.) I argue that a BSA grounded in potencies is preferable to a BSA grounded in categorical properties. Laws of nature, on this view, are those propositions that constitute the simplest and most informative description of potencies.

If a person, A, branches into B and C, then it is widely held that B and C are not identical to one another. Many think that this is because B and C have contradictory properties at the same time. In this paper, I show why this explanation cannot be right. I argue that contradictory properties at times are not necessary for non-identity between descendants, and that contradictory properties at times are not sufficient for non-identity. I also argue that the standard explanation cannot be salvaged by a shift to personal time. Appeals to a lack of continuity, or to the absence of unity of consciousness likewise fail. Rather, B and C are non-identical simply because A branched into B and C. Why branching should be problematic for personal identity remains a deep puzzle though I offer some tentative suggestions.

In a deterministically evolving world, the usefulness of nontrivial probabilities can seem mysterious. I use the ‘Mentaculus’ machinery developed by David Albert and Barry Loewer to show how all probabilities in such a world can be derived from a single, initial chance event. I go on to argue that this is the only genuine chance event. Perhaps surprisingly, we have good evidence of its existence and nature. I argue that the existence of this chance event justifies our epistemic reliance on nontrivial probabilities.

Fundamental properties and the laws of nature go hand in hand: mass and gravitation, charge and electromagnetism, spin and quantum mechanics. So, it is unsurprising that one's account of fundamental properties affects one's view of the laws of nature and vice versa. In this essay, I will survey a variety of recent attempts to provide a joint account of the fundamental properties and the laws of nature. Many of these accounts are new and unexplored. Some of them posit surprising entities, such as counterfacts. Other accounts posit surprising laws of nature, such as instantaneous laws that constrain the initial configuration of particles. These exciting developments challenge our assumptions about our basic ontology and provide fertile ground for further exploration.

OF THE DISSERTATION A Theory of Laws of Nature, Dispositions, and Chances by HEATHER DEMAREST Dissertation Director: Professor Barry Loewer What are the fundamental properties of the world? What is chance? What are the laws of nature? These questions may seem isolated, but in my dissertation, A Theory of Laws, Dispositions, and Chances, I show how they are connected by developing a new account that unifies traditionally disparate elements. I defend the anti-Humean claim that there are some fundamental, modal features in the world—such as chance and dispositional properties. But, I also defend the Humean claim that the laws of nature merely describe the world, rather than govern it. According to my view, which I call the Propensity Best System Account (PBSA), some of the fundamental properties are dispositional—these properties are called potencies if they are deterministic, and propensities if they are chancy. And the laws of nature systematize all of the possible distributions of those properties. The PBSA provides a new way of interpreting a probability measure over all of the possible initial states of the universe: as a fundamental chance that grounds all subsequent chances. I argue that the PBSA accords well with scientific practice. Laws that systematize the distribution of properties suit the importance scientists place on simplicity and informativeness when they describe the regularities in the world. Potencies and propensities, which are necessarily connected to the behavior of the entities that instantiate them, are faithful to the scientific principle that the best way to learn about a system is by studying its characteristic behavior in different (stimulus) conditions. The PBSA avoids many of the serious objections that face traditional, best system