Mulder Jesse M
Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Eur J Philos Sci. 2018;8(3):671-687. doi: 10.1007/s13194-018-0205-9. Epub 2018 May 16.
Humeans take reality to be devoid of 'necessary connections': things just happen. Laws of nature are to be understood in terms of what 'just happens', not vice versa. Here the Humean needs some conception of what it is that 'just happens' - a conception of the . Lewis's Humeanism incorporates such a conception in the form of a Lewis-style metaphysics of objects, properties, and modality. Newer versions of Humeanism about laws of nature, such as the Better Best Systems approach (BBS), typically reject such a Lewisian metaphysics, but it remains unclear what they can offer in its place. By exploring different candidate conceptions, this paper sheds light on the limits of Humeanism about laws of nature: not conceptions of the Humean mosaic form a suitable basis for a Humean theory of laws. In fact, only a metaphysics roughly in line with Lewis's will do. The paper ends with a tentative generalization of this result, thus pointing to the 'limit' of Humeanism in general: taking the Humean way of thinking to its limit results in a rejection of the whole idea of such a mosaic - and hence of Humean mosaic-based accounts of anything.
休谟主义者认为现实中不存在“必然联系”：事情就是这样发生了。自然法则应根据“就是这样发生的事情”来理解，而不是相反。在这里，休谟主义者需要对“就是这样发生的事情”有某种概念——一种关于……的概念。刘易斯的休谟主义以一种关于对象、属性和模态的刘易斯式形而上学的形式包含了这样一种概念。关于自然法则的休谟主义的更新版本，比如最佳系统改进方法（BBS），通常拒绝这种刘易斯式形而上学，但尚不清楚它们能用什么来取而代之。通过探索不同的候选概念，本文揭示了关于自然法则的休谟主义的局限性：并非所有关于休谟拼图的概念都能为休谟主义的法则理论提供合适的基础。事实上，只有大致与刘易斯的形而上学一致的形而上学才行得通。本文最后对这一结果进行了初步的推广，从而指出了一般休谟主义的“局限性”：将休谟式的思维方式推向极限会导致对整个休谟拼图概念的摒弃——进而摒弃基于休谟拼图的任何事物的解释。
