Counterlegals and necessary laws

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 54, Issue 216, 2004, Pages 402-419

  Handfield, Toby ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949236927     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0031-8094.2004.00360.x     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Some well known dispositionalists include B. Ellis, Scientific Essentialism (Cambridge UP, 2001)
2. J. Heil, From an Ontological Point of View (Oxford UP, 2003)
3. C.B. Martin, 'On the Need for Properties: the Road to Pythagoreanism and Back', Synthese, 112 (1997), pp. 193-231
4. and S. Shoemaker, 'Causality and Properties', repr. in his Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge UP, 1984), pp. 206-33
5. E.g., D.M. Armstrong, What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge UP, 1983), pp. 46-52
6. This objection has been raised against dispositionalism by J. Bigelow, 'Scientific Ellisianism', in H. Sankey (ed.), Causation and Laws of Nature (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 57-76, in §6
7. See also D.M. Armstrong, 'The Causal Theory of Properties: Properties according to Shoemaker, Ellis, and Others', Philosophical Topics, 26 (1999), pp. 25-37, in §5
8. S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard UP, 1980), p. 123; my italics
9. Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Oxford UP, 1986), pp. ix-x
10. The idea of nesting conditionals in order to accommodate a non-Humean metaphysic of laws was suggested to me by the treatment offered in J. Bigelow and R. Pargetter, Science and Necessity (Cambridge UP, 1990), at pp. 246-50. Bigelow and Pargetter, however, use two standard counterfactuals, rather than an 'if it turns out that' conditional
11. See 'The Foundations of Two-Dimensional Semantics', at http://consc.net/papers/foundations.html (2002), at §3.10
12. 'Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda', in T.S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds), Conceivability and Possibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 441-92, at p. 442
13. H. Putnam, 'The Meaning of "Meaning" ', in K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind, and Knowledge (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1975), pp. 131-93
14. Two-dimensional semantics are discussed in M. Davies and L. Humberstone, 'Two Notions of Necessity', Philosophical Studies, 38 (1980), pp. 1-30
15. F. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
16. and R. Stalnaker, 'Assertion', Syntax and Semantics, 9 (1978), pp. 315-32
17. Chalmers, 'Does Conceivability Entail Possibility?', in Gendler and Hawthorne (eds), Conceivability and Possibility, pp. 145-200, at pp. 169-71
18. I introduced this idea in 'Dispositional Essentialism and the Possibility of a Law-Abiding Miracle', The Philosophical Quarterly, 51 (2001), pp. 484-94, and argued there for the compatibility of space-invasion with the central theses of dispositionalism
19. Lewis, 'Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow', repr. in his Philosophical Papers, Vol. II, pp. 32-65, at pp. 47-8
20. B. Weatherson, 'Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals', The Philosophical Quarterly, 51 (2001), pp. 200-16, has proposed an epistemic theory of indicative conditionals that may be similarly congenial for my metaphysical purposes