Abstract
Dretske’s influential account of laws stands in sharp contrast to the classical accounts of Hempel, Nagel, Carnap, and Braithwaite. I will, in the following, refer to these somewhat different accounts as “the standard view”. Dretske’s view has been seen as marking a striking shift away from that view, and the beginning of a series of new non-Humean accounts. His account of laws forcefully declared that
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(1)
Laws are relations between, properties, quantities, magnitudes, or features that are expressed by certain predicates.
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(2)
The relations in each law are extensional, and can vary from law to law,
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(3)
Laws are singular sentences rather than general, and
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(4)
The statement of the law All F’s are G will not change it’s truth-value if any co-referential expression replaces “F”, “G”, or both. However the result of that replacement may not be a law. This feature is, he, misleadingly refers to as “the opacity of laws”.
With the exception of the first claim, the remaining ones appear to be a wholesale repudiation of the received view about laws. They are not friendly amendments. If true, they cut deeply into the received view. We turn therefore to a detailed consideration of them.
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Notes
- 1.
The “standard view” is clearly a convenient misnomer. There are several views that it covers, that are radically different from each other, but more akin to each other than to those critics and critiques that followed the view of Hempel.
- 2.
F. Dretske, “Laws of Nature”, Philosophy of Science 44, 2, June 1977, pp. 248–268.
- 3.
The horseshoe indicates the material conditional and the single shafted arrow is used by Dretske in the representation of laws, which may be used for a variety of different relations used in the representation of various laws. (253)
- 4.
If “yields”or “generates” is meant, then there are two serious problems. (1) Those terms seem to be binary relations. What if more than two magnitudes or universals are expressed in the law?, and (2) The notion of yielding or generation sees to require that the law relates magnitudes at different times so that laws that relate magnitudes at simultaneous time are excluded.
- 5.
I assume here that Dretske has something specific in mind in speaking of coextensive properties, universals, or magnitudes. It’s not obvious what the coextensiveness of two properties or universals, or physical magnitudes comes to.
- 6.
There is bigger game at stake than just a radical view of laws. If laws are non-extensional, which their opacity entails (the usual idea is that a context provides an opaque context if and only if it provides a non-extensional context) then one would have to abandon the Quinean program of eschewing non-extensional idioms from scientific discourse. Science, replete with laws, on Dretske’s view would be a huge source of serious non-extensionality – the laws. In what follows, we will use non-extensional context” and “opaque context” interchangeably.
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To that extent then, it is different from Fregean concepts, which are identical if they have exactly the same instances.
- 8.
Cf. R. Courant, Differential and Integral Calculus, Interscience Publishers, 1949 v.I, 182–3, 433–5.
- 9.
The identity relation between magnitudes is extensional, but requires some care. The mass m of an object a can be either a number, r, or a multiple of some unit. I.e. m(a) = r grams, or m(in grams (a) = r. In either case, identity between magnitudes will be extensional: the same objects get the same values.
- 10.
This assumption about magnitudes will be studied and developed in Chap. 10.
- 11.
In (3) there is the product of two magnitudes. This we have called a functional and here we assume that this functional is also a magnitude.
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Koslow, A. (2019). F. Dretske’s Total Rejection of the Hempel-Model. In: Laws and Explanations; Theories and Modal Possibilities. Synthese Library, vol 410. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18846-7_4
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