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5 A central issue in metaphysics is whether there are any necessary relations in nature. The Humean answer is that there are not, so that laws of nature are contingent. The opposing view, that laws of nature are such necessary relations, offers a very different metaphysical picture of the universe. In this essay I primarily address a dispute among non-Humeans as to whether laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, or metaphysically contingent with a weaker kind of necessity, commonly labeled natural, nomological, or nomic necessity. I call the parties to this dispute necessitarians1 and contingentists.2 Restricting the scope of the discussion to fundamental laws, I take up the debate under the assumption that all fundamental properties are dispositional or role properties in part I, arguing that the dispute would then be purely verbal. In part II, I assume that there are categorical intrinsic properties as well as dispositional properties and examine the relation between them. And in part III, I return to the debate between necessitarians and contingentists under the assumption that there are both dispositional and categorical fundamental properties. I conclude that these necessitarian positions can again be recast as contingentist, but that there are some unequivocally contingentist positions that despite being ontologically more complex are to be preferred because they are less mysterious. I take laws to be facts construed as true propositions, rather than statements expressing those facts, though sometimes I explicitly discuss lawstatements . Fundamental facts comprise fundamental laws and facts presenting the distribution of fundamental properties in spacetime. To be fundamental, these facts must provide a metaphysical supervenience base for all other facts, i.e., the remaining facts must hold in all possible worlds with these facts. It looks quite plausible that all the fundamental dynamic laws of our world take the form envisaged by field theories that concern the distribution of fundamental nonkind properties such as mass and Are Fundamental Laws Necessary or Contingent? Noa Latham 98 N. Latham charge throughout spacetime. If so, these laws do not involve fundamental kinds, though kinds such as electrons may feature as nonfundamental aspects of fields. If there were fundamental dynamic laws involving fundamental kinds, they would have to be integrated with the fundamental laws of field theory involving nonkind properties, which presumably also exist. It is hard to see how this could be accomplished other than by treating laws involving kind properties as hierarchically prior and overriding the laws of field theory, rather as laws involving biological and mental kinds have sometimes been thought to override fundamental physical laws.3 It looks unlikely that empirical reasons will be encountered to warrant embracing such a bulky hierarchical system of fundamental dynamic laws for our world. So carving nature at its most fundamental joints will most likely not require sorting particulars into kinds. Throughout the essay I focus on the example of the particle mechanics gravitational law (PMG), which does not involve fields but has the merits of simplicity and familiarity. (PMG) All particles of mass m attract particles of mass m* with a force of Gmm*/d2 , where G = 6.673 × 10–11 m3 kg–1 s–2 . I shall not examine to what extent the discussion would generalize to the case of fields and laws involving fundamental kinds. My discussion henceforth is thus narrower than familiar discussions of laws of nature. I shall not examine nonfundamental laws such as special science laws, ceteris paribus laws of physics, and thermodynamic laws. I see it as preferable in discussing laws of nature not to run together what I take to be very different types of laws in quest of a unified account. I Throughout this essay I assume a distinction between two types of properties akin to those commonly referred to as dispositional and categorical. Some use has been made of this in distinguishing two types of fundamental physical property and assessing the relation of each to phenomenal properties .4 A common thought is that physical theory deals only with dispositional properties, but that dispositional properties require categorical bases. I prefer to speak here of intrinsic natures, or as C. B. Martin puts it, the qualitative side of properties,5 rather than of categorical bases or properties. That is because shape and size are often given as paradigmatic categorical properties, and I take these to be definitive of fundamental particulars. The intrinsic natures, if they exist, do not include the size and shape of spatial [18.217.144.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 22...

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