Christian Löw: Do the Laws Depend on Us?

Abstract
(joint with Chris Dorst and Siegfried Jaag)

Some truths obtain as a matter of law, while others are mere accidents. For example, while it is a law of nature that opposite charges attract, it is a mere accident that all coins in Jack’s pocket are quarters. But is this distinction between laws and non-laws written into the deep structure of reality, or does it somehow depend on us?

Most theories identify laws of nature with distinctive, mind-independent aspects of reality. For instance, Maudlin (2007) argues that laws of nature are special entities that somehow help produce later states of the world from earlier states. Armstrong (1983) holds that laws are grounded in a distinctive kind of ‘necessitation’ universal that is instantiated by first-order universals. Why, then, would anyone believe that the laws of nature depend on us? This view seems to jeopardize the objectivity of science and lead to an objectionable form of relativism (Lewis 1994, 479).

In this paper, we show that our actual best candidates for the laws of nature all share certain features that make them unreasonably useful for us. And we argue that the best explanation for why the laws have these features is that what counts as a law of nature indeed is dependent on the distinctive capacities of creatures like us.