Tooley - the nature of laws.pdf - Ted Sider

Michael Tooley
but only accidentally true generalizations in others. So there cannot
be any property of lawlikeness which a statement has simply in virtue
of its meaning, and which together with truth is sufficient to make a
statement a law.
A second attempt to explain what it is for a statement to express a
law appeals to the fact tha laws entail some counterfactuals, and
support others, while accidentally true generalizations do neither. If
this approach is to provide a noncircular analysis, it must be possible to
give a satisfactory account of the truth conditions of subjunctive
conditional statements which does not involve the concept of a law.
This does not seem possible. The traditional, consequence analysis of
subjunctive conditionals explicitly employs the concept of a law. And
the principal alternative, according to which truth conditions for
subjunctive conditionals are formulated in terms of comparative
similarity relations among possible worlds, involves implicit reference
to laws, since possession of the same laws is one of the factors that
weighs most heavily in judgments concerning the similarity of
different possible worlds. The latter theory is also exposed to very
serious objections.3 As a result, it appears unlikely that any noncircular
analysis of the concept of a law in terms of subjunctive conditional
statements is possible.
A third approach to the problem of analyzing the concept of a law
is the view, advanced by Ramsey, that laws are "consequences of those
propositions which we should take as axioms if we knew everything
and organized it as simply as possible in a deductive system/'4 My
earlier example of the universe in which there are ten different types
of fundamental particles, two of which never interact, shows that this
account does not provide an adequate description of the truth
conditions of laws. In the world where particles of types Xand Y never
meet, there will be many true generalizations about their behavior
when they interact. Unfortunately, none of these generalizations will
have any positive instances; they will all be only vacuously true. So
knowledge of everything that happens in such a universe will not
enable one to furmulate a unique axiomatic system containing
670
3 See, for example, the incisive discussions by Jonathan Bennett in his article,
"Counterfactuals and Possible Worlds," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4
(1974), pages 381-402, and, more recently, by Frank Jackson in his article, "A
Causal Theory of Counterfactuals", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 55
(1977), pages 3-21.
4 F. P. Ramsey, "General Propositions and Causality," in The Foundations of
Mathematics, edited by R. B. Braithwaite, Paterson, New Jersey, 1960, page 242.
The view described in the passage is one which Ramsey had previously held,
rather than the view he was setting out in the paper itself. For a sympathetic
discussion of Ramsey's earlier position, see pages 72-77 of David Lewis's
Counterfactuals, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973.