Laws of Nature and Chances

Abstract Laws of Nature and Chances presents a novel account of the metaphysics of laws, chances, fundamental ontology, and the arena it occupies called “the Package Deal Account” (PDA). The PDA attempts to answer Stephen Hawking’s question “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Its answer builds on David Lewis’s Humean Best Systems Account (BSA) of laws and chances but rejects Lewis’s Humean ontology and instead lets the criteria that physicists employ for evaluating candidate theories of everything, together with reality, determine the universe’s fundamental ontology, space-time, and laws. The PDA takes seriously Quine’s claim that science “begins in the middle” and his epistemological holism and combines it with Lewis’s Humean idea that the role of laws is to systematize to produce a metaphysical account that advances the project of naturalizing metaphysics. It provides a novel metaphysics for the foundations of science. The book first discusses the history of the concept of laws of nature and current philosophical accounts of the metaphysics of laws and arguments for and against each. It then shows how the PDA overcomes objections to each with focus on Lewis’s Humean BSA and why, unlike Lewis’s Humean account and its non-Humean rivals, it can accommodate recent developments in physics, including proposals for theories of quantum gravity that reject the fundamentality of space-time.