Modals:
1. Background: different kinds of necessity
Reality, Week 2:
Laws and Chance
Cian Dorr
October 19th
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Throughout the course, we’ll need to be talking about
metaphysical necessity and possibility.
• Metaphysical necessity is supposed to be the strongest
kind of necessity. If it is metaphysically necessary that P,
then there is no sense in which it is possible that not-P. If
it is is possible in any sense that P, then it is
metaphysically possible that P.
• For it to be metaphysically impossible that P, the
supposition that P must “contain a contradiction”.
• Examples: that all dogs are dogs; that all bachelors are
unmarried; that there are no round squares; that all water
contains hydrogen...
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“Possible worlds”
It is possible that P at some PW, P.
It is necessary that P at every PW, P.
• Worlds can be metaphysically possible,
nomically possible, etc.
• Understand ‘worlds’ as ‘ways for things to be’.
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‘necessary’
2. Chance ‘possible’
3. Humean reductionism about laws and chance
‘impossible’
4. Anti-Humean theories of laws and chance ‘must’/’has to’
5. Some arguments ‘can’/’could have’
6. Humean Supervenience, again •They can be used to mean a wide variety of
7. Some putative counterexamples to HS different things, depending on the context.
• Consider ‘It’s impossible for me to make it to your
party’.
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In today’s class we will also need to be talking about
nomic necessity: a distinctive sense of ‘necessary’
often invoked in the sciences. A temporally relativised notion of nomic necessity:
what is “nomically necessary at t” is what is
• It is nomically necessary that particles in a vacuum move
nomically necessary given the complete truth about
in straight lines. It’s a law of nature.
• Note that the hypothesis that a particle in a vacuum history up to t.
moves in some other way does not seem to be “implicitly
contradictory”; it just goes against how the world works.
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Chance
1. Background: different kinds of necessity
2. Chance
3. Humean reductionism about laws and chance ‘The chance that this coin will land heads the next
4. Anti-Humean theories of laws and chance time it is tossed is 1/2.’
5. Some arguments ‘The chance that Fred has blue eyes, given that he
6. Humean Supervenience, again has one blue-eyed and one heterozygous brown-
7. Some putative counterexamples to HS eyed parent, is 1/2’.
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 Law as a special case of chance?

The probability axioms (Kolmogorov):

(1) P(A∨¬A) = 1
(2) If A entails B, then P(A) ≤ P(B)
(3) If A and B are inconsistent, then P(A) + P(B) = A temporally relativised notion of chance: the chance Simple equation: To be a law is to have chance 1.
P(A∨B) as of t that P = the chance that P given the complete • Worries about continua
truth about history up to t. • Perhaps some non-basic “laws”, e.g. the second law of
• Chances (and conditional chances) obey these axioms.
thermodynamics, have chance slightly less than 1.
• But lots of other things also obey the axioms—e.g.
“probabilists” hold that any rational person’s degrees of
confidence do.

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Should we forget about lawhood? Reducing laws to regularities

1. Background: different kinds of necessity

2. Chance
I think that our present use of the expression ‘laws of nature’
carries traces of the conception of Nature as subject to 3. Humean reductionism about laws and chance
An old-fashioned reductionist theory of laws (“the
command. Whether these commands are conceived to be 4. Anti-Humean theories of laws and chance simple regularity theory”): a law of nature is just any
those of an impersonal deity or, as by the Greeks, of an
5. Some arguments truth that is “lawlike”
impersonal fate, makes no difference here. The point, in
either case, is that the sovereign is thought to be so powerful 6. Humean Supervenience, again • What does that mean? Universally quantified, containing
that its dictates are bound to be obeyed. 7. Some putative counterexamples to HS only qualitative predicates....
A.J. Ayer, ‘What is a law of nature?’

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Reducing chances to frequencies Best-system analyses

An old-fashioned reductionist theory of chance

• Standard objection: it is not a law, though it may be true,
that all gold spheres are less than a mile in diameter; but
it is a law that all uranium spheres are less than a mile in
diameter.
• And in a different possible world, it might be a law that
all gold spheres are less than a mile in diameter.
(“finite frequentism”): the chance that this coin will
land Heads = the number of times that similar coins
land Heads, divided by the number of times they are
tossed.
• How do we generalise this?
• We could say: the chance that P = the proportion of
propositions of the same kind as the proposition that P
that are true.
• What does ‘of the same kind’ mean?
Lewis (inspired by Ramsey and Mill): to be nomically
necessary is to be a consequence the set of truths
about the world that does the best overall job of
combining simplicity and strength (the ‘best system’).
• What is it for one proposition to be more or less simple
than another?
• Lewis: look at their linguistic expressions in a language
where every predicate stands for a perfectly natural
property.

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 Extending the BSA to chance
1. Background: different kinds of necessity
2. Chance
3. Humean reductionism about laws and chance
The chance that P = the number assigned to P by the
probability function that best combines simplicity 4. Anti-Humean theories of laws and chance
and fit 5. Some arguments
• ‘fit’ ≃ ‘assigning high probability to the actual course of 6. Humean Supervenience, again
events’ 7. Some putative counterexamples to HS
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Does lawhood explain truth?
1. Background: different kinds of necessity
2. Chance Does the fact that it is a law that momentum is
3. Humean reductionism about laws and chance conserved explain the fact that momentum is
4. Anti-Humean theories of laws and chance conserved?
5. Some arguments • Yes, according to many anti-Humeans
6. Humean Supervenience, again • For the best-system theorist, the explanation seems to go
in the other direction: it’s because it’s true that
7. Some putative counterexamples to HS momentum is conserved that ‘momentum is conserved’
gets to be in the best system.
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Counterexamples to the BSA? Lawhood
The Principal Principle:
If you know that the chance that P is x, and you have
World A: a single particle travels in a straight line in
no other evidence relevant to whether P, then your
otherwise empty space. It is a law that
degree of confidence that P should be x.
whenever two particles collide, they bounce off
each other.
World B: the exact same history; but this is not a law.
Instead, the law is that whenever two particles
collide, they stick together.
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Anti-Humean theories of laws and chances
Suppose that you accept the counterexamples and
thus must reject any kind of reduction of law and
chance to the kind of facts Humeans believe in.
What then?
• Carroll, Lange, Maudlin: that it’s a law that P is a
primitive, rock-bottom fact: there is nothing informative
to be said about what it is for this to be the case.
• Dretske, Tooley, Armstrong: for it to be a law that all Fs
are Gs is for a certain special relation, N, to hold
between the properties of F-ness and G-ness.
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Epistemic worries about primitivism
Reductionists can hope to explain the norms that
govern our reasoning about lawhood and chance by
deriving them from more general norms of reasoning.
Primitivists, by contrast, have to take them as new
basic epistemological principles.
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Counterexamples to the BSA? Chance
World C: a single coin is tossed 10 times in otherwise
empty space. It lands Heads on tosses 1,3,4 and
7. The chance of Heads on each toss is 1/2.
World D: the exact same history. The chance of
Heads on each toss is 1/3.
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 The manifold hypothesis
(mass/charge version)
Reality consists of spacetime points.
• Spacetime points stand in spatiotemporal relationships,
e.g. certain points are between certain others.
• Thanks to these relationships, the points have the
mathematical structure of a four-dimensional
differentiable manifold.
• The spacetime points also differ as regards the values of
certain fields—mass-density and charge-density.
...and that’s all.
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If this is right, then if World A and World B are both
metaphysically possible, or World C and World D are
both metaphysically possible, the Mass-Charge
hypothesis is refuted.
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Supervenience A tempting suggestion:
Suggestion: the Mass-Charge Hypothesis commits us
to thinking that all facts metaphysically supervene on
A-facts supervene on B-facts iff any two possible
the facts about
worlds that differ as regards A-facts also differ as
a. what spacetime points there are
regards B-facts.
• We can speak of metaphysical, nomic, etc.
b. what spatiotemporal relations hold between them
c. what the mass-density and charge-density is at each point
supervenience depending on what kind of possibility is
of interest. It’ll normally be metaphysical supervenience • The thought: If there were further questions whose
we care about. answers were not settled by these facts—e.g. questions
about colour—that would refute the ‘that’s all’ claim.
• Perhaps we could even think of the supervenience
claim as a rigorous articulation of the ‘that’s all’ claim.
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The problem with the suggestion
The following is clearly true, however:
No two possible worlds where the MCH is true differ
in any way unless they differ as regards facts about:
a. what spacetime points there are
b. what spatiotemporal relations hold between them
It seems coherent to think that the Mass-Charge
Hypothesis is true at the actual world even though c. what the mass-density and charge-density is at each point
that it is metaphysically possible that it is false (e.g. in • Unfortunately, this does not shed light on what the
a possible world with additional physical fields). ‘that’s all’ clause is.
• And it leaves us free to accept—if we want—that there
are pairs of worlds like World A and World B, or World
C and World D, so long as we think that at most one
member of each pair is a MCH-world.
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