Necessities Overboard: A Reply to Lange

Abstract

A classic objection to Humeanism about scientific laws is that Humeans cannot makesenseofthe counterfactualinvariance ofthelaws. Forexample,iftherewere‘noth-ingintheentirehistoryoftheuniverseexceptasingleelectron’(Lange,2009,p. 55)then, intuitively, the laws would still be the same. But classic Humean views don’t seem to get such results. Some influential modern Humean views, particularly Dorst (2020), Loew & Jaag (2019), and Bhogal (2020), have argued that the Humean can, in fact, make sense of counterfactual invariance. Against this, Marc Lange (2022) has recently argued that modern Humean approaches are unsatisfactory. His conclusion that ‘this is the kind of evidence on which research programmes…should be judged’ (p. 27) suggests that he takes this to be (close to) a fatal problem for Humeanism. In this discussion note I defend the Humean – in particular, the view of Bhogal (2020)–againstLange. ThekeyideaisthattheHumeanshouldthinkoftheirreduction of the laws to the Humean mosaic as closely related to other views where we reduce one domain to another but still allow that the higher-level domain can be ‘autonomous’ of the lower-level in some respects – like, for example, the view that the special sciences reduce to physics but can still can work autonomously of physics.