Umeå University's logo

umu.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Humeanism, modality, and the governing conception of natural laws
Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany.
Umeå University, Faculty of Arts, Department of historical, philosophical and religious studies.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4051-2476
2025 (English)In: Australasian Journal of Philosophy, ISSN 0004-8402, E-ISSN 1471-6828Article in journal (Refereed) Accepted
Abstract [en]

A common objection against Humean reductionism about laws is an argument from governing: It is natural to think that laws of nature govern. But in order to govern the laws need to be independent of the phenomena they govern. Hence, Humean laws, which reduce to patterns in the phenomena and so lack this independence, cannot govern. A standard Humean response to this argument is that we should not place much weight on the intuition that laws govern. Non-Humeans, however, reply that the argument does not merely rest on intuitions but that scientific practice presupposes governing. In this paper, we offer a response to this revised challenge to Humeanism by giving a detailed account of the laws’ role in scientific modelling. We argue that while Humean theories indeed cannot capture certain governing-intuitions, they still can make sense of those aspects of science that allegedly motivate governing.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Taylor & Francis, 2025.
Keywords [en]
Laws of Nature, Best Systems Account, Humeanism about Laws, Modality, Scientific Modelling, Governing
National Category
Philosophy
Research subject
Theoretical Philosophy
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-236293OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-236293DiVA, id: diva2:1943205
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2023-1533Available from: 2025-03-10 Created: 2025-03-10 Last updated: 2025-07-09

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Other links

Journal webpage

Authority records

Loew, Christian

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Loew, Christian
By organisation
Department of historical, philosophical and religious studies
In the same journal
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Philosophy

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 79 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf