Against Necessitarianism

The laws of nature are at most physically necessary, and they are not metaphysically necessary. Dispositional Essentialists claim that if natural laws derive from powers, then the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. But the idea that properties have dispositional essences does not entail necessitarianism for several reasons. There might be no laws of nature. The laws might have exceptions, or be probabilistic. There are non-dispositional properties that could figure in contingent laws. The world might have contained different properties. Finally, even if a property has a dispositional essence, it might have had a slightly different causal profile. Furthermore, the Necessitarian’s views are less revisionary than they initially seem.