Alex Bird: Dispositional theory of Laws of Nature

Reading for this Meeting: LINK

Join our newsletter: By simply adding your email to our form, you'll be subscribed to P&G's weekly philosophy reading materials: LINK

Our Discord Group: LINK

WARNING:
It is full of philosophical jargon and complex technical terms. Your expectation should be to treat it as a graduate seminar in philosophy. We don't assume you have a degree in philosophy, but we do assume philosophical maturity, and/or a crazy level of passion for deductive reasoning. If you are into that sort of thing, be my guest.

Details:

Think of properties—mass, charge, fragility—not as inert labels, but as packages of built-in powers. To have charge just is to repel or attract in certain ways. To be fragile just is to shatter when struck. If that’s true, then the laws of nature aren’t mysterious rules glued on top of the universe—they’re simply what follows from the natures of those properties.

So: fix the properties, and the laws come for free. If mass is essentially that which resists acceleration and generates gravitational attraction, then Newton’s laws aren’t contingent “cosmic habits,” they’re locked in by what mass is. That’s why Bird says laws are metaphysically necessary—they hold in all possible worlds where those properties exist.