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Analysis Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2009
Analysis 2009 69(4):668-677; doi:10.1093/analys/anp093
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© The Authors 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Dispositional essentialism and the necessity of laws

Robin Findlay Hendry

Durham University 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK r.f.hendry@durham.ac.uk

Darrell P. Rowbottom

University of Oxford 10 Merton Street, Oxford OX1 4JJ, UK darrell.rowbottom@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   1. Dispositional essentialism vs. quidditism?
 
It used to be assumed, by Humeans and non-Humeans alike, that laws of nature are contingent. Indeed allowing for contingency was widely taken to be a desideratum on the acceptability of any account of natural laws. However, nomic necessitarians argue that even if laws of nature are logically contingent (so that putative law statements cannot be analytic), they are metaphysically necessary. Their arguments are typically, though not always, founded on dispositional essentialism.1 Dispositional essentialism about a property is the view that its essence is dispositional: the dispositions it confers are what make the property what it is (Bird 2007a: 44).

The argument for nomic necessitarianism is roughly as follows (see for instance Mumford 2004: 103–4). Suppose it is a law that all Fs are Gs (e.g. that all salt dissolves in water), but that the nomic status is contingent. On a non-Humean account of laws like Armstrong's, although . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   2. Counternomics
 

   3. Our model: dispositional contextualism
 

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