Challenging the Powers-Based Best System Account of Laws (paper)
According to the Powers-Based Best System Account (PBSA), laws are the axioms of the systematisation of powerful property distributions that achieves the best balance among various theoretical virtues. The proponents of PBSA motivate their view by arguing that it has at least two significant virtues: first, it is close to the actual scientific practice by mirroring scientists’ interest in providing strong simple generalizations that unify apparently disparate phenomena. And second, it can meet some of the difficulties besetting the other extant accounts of laws. In this work I critically examine the claim of PBSA theorists that their theory can solve two important problems plaguing the ‘traditional’ Qualities-Based BSA (QBSA) and Bird’s Dispositional Essentialist Account of Laws (DEAL), respectively. More precisely, I discuss the proposed solutions to the “impoverished worlds” difficulty for QBSA and the objection expressed by Ioannidis, Livanios and Psillos (2021) that DEAL cannot accommodate significant nomic features such as functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries. My conclusion is that the solutions offered cannot provide strong motivating reasons for adopting PBSA. This upshot affects the strength of the motivation for PBSA, as well as the plausibility of the claim that PBSA should be preferred over Ioannidis et al. Dualist Model of laws and powers because it offers solutions to the problematic (for the powers-based accounts of laws) issues in an ontologically more parsimonious way.
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The Metaphysics of Powerful Qualities: Powerful Categoricalism and the Laws of Nature (book under contract with Routledge)
In recent years a monistic view about the nature of properties has received considerable attention in the philosophical literature, the Powerful Qualities View (PQV). The core tenet of PQV is that properties are both dispositional and categorical/qualitative. There exist various interpretations of the main principle of PQV yielding different versions of the theory. In spite of the increased popularity of PQV, what has been missing so far is a book-length comprehensive presentation of PQV in its distinct versions. The first aim of this monograph is to provide a detailed examination of the various forms of PQV and their philosophical prospects. The book covers all the metaphysical issues regarding PQV and examines in detail various objections plaguing it. It reveals advantages and drawbacks of each version of the theory paying special attention to those difficulties that seem to make it unstable and perhaps incomprehensible.
In its second part, the book articulates, develops, and defends a novel version of PQV which I call Powerful Categoricalism (PC). After the discussion of the first part which reveals the weaknesses of the extant versions of PQV, the second part of the book capitalizes on the previous work of Ioannidis, Livanios and Psillos (“No laws and (thin) powers in, no (governing) laws out”, European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 2021) to defend PC. In particular, in the above-mentioned paper, Ioannidis et al. argue that an adequate solution to the Inference Problem (that is, the alleged incapability of higher order nomic facts to determine the regularities in the behaviour of actual objects) requires an answer to the question of how nomic relations manage to ‘tell’ properties what to do. Ioannidis et al. dub the difficulty that all extant accounts of governing laws face to give such an answer, the Governing Problem and introduce a Dualist Model, according to which the specific behaviour of things in the world is the outcome of both the thin powers properties have to be subjected to laws, and certain nomic features of the world. The second part of the book aims to show how a particularly developed version of the Dualist Model (according to which natural properties have the minimum compatible with the core tenets of the Model modal strength) can support an alternative understanding of the main tenet of PQV and, as a result, a novel form of the theory. This part, in combination with the discussion of the difficulties of the other versions discussed in the first part, will not defend only the tenability of PC but also its superiority over the other extant versions.