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Lewis, Thau, and Hall on Chance and the Best-System Account of Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

John F. Halpin
John F. Halpin*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Oakland University
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Abstract

This article considers the recent work of David Lewis, Ned Hall, and Michael Thau on chance and the best system account of law. My rejoinder suggests that, though their proposals may succeed at the stated goal of reworking the problematic relationship between chance, credence, and law, the resulting account of law suffers from an even more significant difficulty. To oversimplify a bit, I argue that their account is unable to handle the nomic necessity of laws. My criticisms suggest an alternative account of law which provides, I argue, a preferable account of nomic necessity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 349 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1998

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan 48309–4401.

‡

I wish to thank James Hawthorne and two anonymous referees for particularly acute comments on this paper. The research was supported by NSF Grant #DIR-9021631.

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