Duguid, C orcid.org/0000-0001-7140-6225 (2021) Lawful Humean explanations are not circular. Synthese, 199 (3-4). pp. 6039-6059. ISSN 0039-7857
Abstract
A long-standing charge of circularity against regularity accounts of laws has recently seen a surge of renewed interest. The difficulty is that we appeal to laws to explain their worldly instances, but if these laws are descriptions of regularities in the instances then they are explained by those very instances. By the transitivity of explanation, we reach an absurd conclusion: instances of the laws explain themselves. While drawing a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations merely modifies the challenge rather than resolving it, I argue that it does point us towards an attractive solution. According to Humeanism, the most prominent form of the regularity view, laws capture information about important patterns in the phenomena. By invoking laws in scientific explanations, Humeans are showing how a given explanandum is subsumed into a more general pattern. Doing so both undermines a principle of transitivity that plays a crucial role in the circularity argument and draws out a central feature of the Humean approach to scientific explanation.
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Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | Explanation; Grounding; Humeanism; Laws of nature; Lewis |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > School of Philosophy (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 10 Feb 2021 11:37 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:34 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11229-021-03058-y |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:170885 |
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