Challenging Lewis's challenge to the best system account of lawhood

Rafal Urbaniak

Bert Leuridan

pp. 1649-1666

in: Andrew McFarland (ed), Causation in the metaphysics of science, Synthese 195 (4), 2018.

Abstract

David Lewis has formulated a well-known challenge to his Best System account of lawhood: the content of any system whatever can be formulated very simply if one allows for perverse choices of primitive vocabulary. We show that the challenge is not that dangerous, and that to account for it one need not invoke natural properties (Lewis in Aust J Phil 61: 343–377, 1983) or relativized versions of the Best System account (Cohen and Callender in Phil Stud 145: 1–34, 2009). This way, we help to move towards an even better Best System account. We discuss extensions of our strategy to the discussions about the indexicality of the notion of laws of nature (Roberts in Phil Sci 66: S502–S511, 1999), and to another trivialization argument (Unterhuber in Erkenntnis 79: 1833–1847, 2014).

Cited authors

Lewis David