Objections

I will conclude by considering some possible objections to HD.

Objection 1: “Why suppose that it is the judgments of human scientists that determine which propositions count as laws? Why not the scientists of some other alien community?”42

40_{See Chalmers (2012, 63-71) for an idealization that would work for HD.}

41_{This may be a point where I disagree with Hall (manuscript, 4.6), who claims that scientists’ implicit}

standards for judging lawhood are “constitutive” of lawhood.

Response: To see the problem with this objection, it is useful to apply it to the case of games. Why is it that the game judgments of subjects inourcommunity determine which practices count as games? Why not the judgments of subjects in someothercommunity at other times?

The response is that GD is a thesis about howweuse the term ‘game’, not how some other community uses the term. Similarly, the reason HD appeals to human scientists is be- cause the term ‘law’ is a term used by scientists inourcommunity. (Of course, objection 1 would be a much greater concern if HS was an attempt at either conceptual or metaphysical analysis- see 4.7.2).

Objection 2: “HD isn’t appropriately explanatory. It doesn’t explain what all the laws have in common. Nor does it explainwhyscientists draw the law/non- law distinction the way that they do.”

Response: I have already addressed the issue of what the laws have in common in 4.7.1. Most likely, there isn’t any unifying feature that all and only the laws have in common. Most terms from natural language do not have neat analyses, so we shouldn’t expect a neat analysis of law statements either.

As for why scientists draw the distinction they do: there are different types of explana- tions we might give. We could give a pragmatic explanation: scientists draw this distinction because it is (apparently) useful for accomplishing the aims of science. Or we could give a historical explanation: maybe the distinction derives from a now-abandoned picture where God’s decrees govern the universe.

These may not be the types of explanations the objector has in mind. But the proponent of HD will deny that there is any “deeper” explanation available. On this point, it is useful to again consider the term ‘game’. We can give pragmatic or historical explanations of why humans draw a distinction between games and non-games in the way they do. But there is no further “deep” explanation of this distinction: we can imagine communities using the term ‘game’ in a slightly different way. So too we can imagine communities that use the

term ‘law’ in a slightly different way.43

4.8 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have presented a new epistemic argument for Humeanism about laws of nature. Standard epistemic arguments for HS attempt to show that actual empirical evidence does not justify our law judgments over certain rival law hypotheses that are coherent if HS is false. But I have argued that, even if scientists were to learn that such a rival hypothesis obtained, they would continue talking about laws just as they did before. I then argued that the best explanation of this behavior is that scientists are actually talking about Humean laws. To conclude the chapter, I discussed how the Humean might use the new epistemic argument to deflect certain objections to HS from the literature.

43_{Hall (manuscript, 6.2) raises an objection to HS that is very similar to objection 2. Hall worries that, on a}

Humean view, it would be just as informative for scientists to learn about regularities in the initial conditions as it would be to learn about the regularities we typically consider to be laws. So by the Humean’s lights, there is no explanation of why scientists do not count such regularities in the initial conditions to be laws.

In response: Hall’s observation only shows that scientists do not use ‘law’ as a blanket term for all regu- larities worth knowing. And why don’t they? Well, we might provide a pragmatic explanation, or a historical explanation, or. . ..

5 METAPHYSICAL AND CONCEPTUAL GROUNDING

5.1 Introduction

Recently, many theorists have claimed that the world has an ordered, hierarchical structure.1 _{Entities at lower ontological levels are said tometaphysically ground entities}

at higher ontological levels. It has also recently been claimed that our language has an ordered, hierarchical structure.2 _{Semantically primitive sentences are said toconceptually}

ground less primitive sentences. It is often emphasized that metaphysical grounding is a relation between things out in the world, not a relation between our sentences. But I will argue that not enough care has been taken to distinguish these two types of grounding. Conflating these relations is easy to do, given that both types of grounding are expressed by non-causal “in-virtue-of” claims.

The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the relation between metaphysical and con- ceptual grounding. In section 5.2, I’ll argue that conceptual grounding is independent from metaphysical grounding. In sections 5.3-5.4, I’ll argue that conceptual and metaphysical grounding are exclusive: if a given in-virtue-of claim involves conceptual grounding, then it does not involve metaphysical grounding. In section 5.5, I’ll give some heuristics for deciding which type of grounding is relevant in a given case. These heuristics suggest that many proposed cases of metaphysical grounding may not involve metaphysical grounding at all. I’ll conclude by explaining why these results should interest both supporters and detractors of the study of metaphysical grounding.

1_{See, e.g., Schaffer (2009), Audi (2012a).} 2_{See Chalmers (2012, 452-460).}