Why Are There High-Level Regularities?

Abstract Fodor famously asked the question of why there is anything except physics. Assuming physicalism, there is a sense in which physics is all there is. However, there are lots of non-physical regularities in the world—regularities of economics and biology and history and so on. Isn’t it surprising that such regularities arise from the blooming, buzzing, confusion of the microphysical level? I suggest an approach to the puzzle. The easy part of the approach involves arguing that properties are so abundant that there will always be higher-level regularities, if there are no restrictions on the properties involved. However, the high-level regularities we care about are formulated using only relatively natural, non-gerrymandered properties. Why is this the case? I approach this question by considering what makes for natural properties in the higher-level sciences. Is there something about high-level naturalness that implies that there will be regularities about those properties? Many accounts of higher-level naturalness imply that there is not. But some accounts reduce the notion of high-level naturalness to patterns of facts at the fundamental level. Such reductive accounts can be formulated so the existence of high-level regularities that are formulated using only natural properties flows directly from the account. This provides a kind of answer to the question about high-level regularities—they exist because of the nature of high-level naturalness. I illustrate this using a version of Loewer’s package deal account of naturalness and my own favored account of high-level naturalness.