Clarifications

Here are a few remarks on how to interpret the above analysis.

(i)“Actual subjects”: HD shouldnot be interpreted as saying thatP is a law in some possible worldW iff scientistsinW would (ideally) judge thatP is a law. On this interpre- tation, HD would make lawhood very subjective; it would imply, for example, that in any worldW where there are no scientists, there are also no laws of nature. The correct reading is: P is a law of nature in a possible world W iffactual scientists— using their concepts as they actually do — would judge thatP is a law of nature when given a description of W.

(ii)Correspondence between truths and judgments: HD assumes that truths about the laws do not outstrip scientists’ (fully-informed, idealized38_{) law judgments. In this sense,}

HD assumes that law judgments are similar to judgments about games. Suppose that we were given all of the relevant information about the rules, aims, history, etc. of a practiceX. Suppose that, on the basis of all of evidence, we judge thatX is a game. It is implausible

that, nonetheless, X could fail to be a game. This motivates the following deflationary analysis of gamehood:

Game Deflationism (GD): A practiceX is a game iff (actual) subjects would (ideally) judge that the predicate ‘is a game’ applies toXwhengiven an appro- priate description of the practice in question.

Similarly, HD asserts that, if scientists were told all the information in the Humean base, and thereby judged thatP is a law, it could not be the case thatP nonetheless fails to be a law.

This correspondence between law truths and law judgments is supported by the Oracle thought experiments. As discussed in 4.4.3, these cases indicate that “hidden” non-Humean facts are irrelevant to ordinary scientific practice. So we should not expect the truth of law statements to outstrip what we could learn from observing and measuring the Humean base. Of course, HD does not guarantee that scientists’actuallaw judgments are correct; I discuss this point in the next two notes.

(iii) “Appropriate description of the Humean base”: One reason why truth and judg- ment diverge is that scientists only have access to limited evidence. For example, 19th- century Newtonian physicists made false law judgments because they were unaware of, e.g., the gravitational deflection of light. This is why HD appeals to the judgments of scientists who arefully-informedabout the Humean base.39

(iv) Idealization: Even when assuming full information, we can still imagine law truths outstripping scientists’ law judgments. For example, a full description of the Humean base may be too complex for scientists to fully process. Similarly, scientists may make

39_{Two further notes on this point. (i) The restriction to full information about theHumean baseis impor-}

tant because HD would be trivial if the evidential base included facts about the laws themselves. This is also why HD appeals to an an “appropriate description” of the Humean base: the base must not be described in a way that builds in information about the world’s nomic facts. (ii) One might worry that, since scientists are never presented with theentire Humean mosaic, the entire mosaic will not be relevant to determining which regularities count as laws. If this is a legitimate concern, one can modify HD so that scientists are instead presented with some restricted portion of the Humean mosaic (e.g., the portion of the mosaic that is observable or measurable by human subjects).

mistaken judgments about the laws due to careless reflection on the evidence. To account for such cases, the judgments relevant to HD require a cognitive idealization. For example, the idealization should allow subjects to entertain thoughts of arbitrary complexity, should idealize away from missteps in reasoning, etc.40

(v) HD vs. conceptual analyses: HD should not be viewed as a conceptual analysis of law statements. Traditional conceptual analyses must meet various criteria of adequacy; common criteria include that the definition be necessary, analytic and/or a priori. But HD meets none of these criteria. Instead, HD relies on the correspondence between law truths and scientists’ (fully-informed) law judgments to give an extensionally adequate characterization of law statements.

(vi) Mistaken metaphysical interpretations of HD: HD says that the regularities that fall under the predicate ‘is a law’ are the ones that fully-informed scientists judge to fall under that predicate. In contrast, HD does not say that law facts areconstituted by, meta- physically grounded in,made true by, orreducible tofacts about the epistemic practices of scientists.41 (Compare: what property we express by the predicate ‘is spherical’ is deter- mined by how ordinary speakers use the term ‘is spherical’. But it would be a confusion to say that whether something is sphericalmetaphysicallydepends on how we use the term ‘is spherical’.)