Article contents
Wilson's Laws and Other Worlds*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
I like the idea behind this book. It is an empiricist alternative to the powerful and influential contemporary rationalist position on scientific law, causality, and counterfactuals, associated with Chisholm and David Lewis, which “takes its inspiration from modal logic and set theory [and] involves … an assumption of non-truth-functional connectives to define unanalyzable natural necessities, or defines such connectives and such necessities in terms of an ontology of possible worlds”. Wilson's views, springing from Hume and Nelson Goodman, involve no unobservables such as natural necessities or possible worlds, but are based instead on good old Humean laws of constant conjunction. How lovely if Wilson could pull this off!
- Type
- Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Spring 1989 , pp. 321 - 328
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989
References
1 Ibid., ix.
2 Ibid., 18.
3 Lewis, David, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).Google Scholar
4 Wilson, , Laws, 20ff.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., 227.
6 Ibid., 265.
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