In No Categorical Terms: A Sketch for an Alternative Route to a Humean Interpretation of Laws

Philosophers of science will be familiar with the “canonical” debate in metaphysics over the modal status of natural laws. In this debate, the Humean faction adopts a world-view in which the fundamental properties are categorical, from which it follows that natural laws are metaphysically contingent. The Anti-Humeans, on the other hand, adopt an account in which the fundamental properties are essentially dispositional, which entails that the laws are metaphysically necessary. In this paper I will argue that the basic terms in which this debate is conducted are woefully out of date from a scientific point of view. I will further argue that once we rectify this the categorical properties that the Humean’s contingentism about laws is built upon no longer have any place – nor that there is much room to accommodate a contingentist account of laws in any case. The first moral to draw from all this is that Humeanism understood ala the canonical account is more or less dead in the water. But since the basic terms of the canonical dispute are long past their sell-by date anyway, we need not take that to imply that Humeanism is dead tout court. I will argue that an interpretation of laws compatible with Humean strictures is in fact still very much in the offing: it cannot, it appears, be a Humeanism built on the ediface of categorical properties, nor even one that commits to contingentism; but I think we can claim it as a Humean approach to laws nonetheless.