Oh, I don’t pretend to be presenting an explanation for the existence of regularities. I don’t think any philosophical account of the laws of nature can do that. The right sort of response to a question like “Why does this regularity exist?” is going to come from science. It’s going to appeal to some deeper theoretical understanding of the relevant system. All-purpose philosophical explanations like “Because it is a law of nature” or “Because of the causal structure of the universe” aren’t really explanations at all. I think one of the reasons for the persistence of the prescriptive view of laws is the illusory promise of a universal explanation of regularity. Once we give up the hope that philosophy is going to save us from the unavoidable curse of unexplained explainers, we can set about the business of figuring out the actual scientific role of the concept “laws of nature”.
So I’m not picking any of the bad answers you propose to the question of why there is a regularity. I don’t think you can get any useful answer at that level of generality. The right answer is going to depend on what regularity you’re talking about and is going to look like science, not philosophy.
Interesting. How do you get around the problem that not all regularities are something we would consider a law of nature, even when generalizable? (Trivial example: I buy a pair of jeans and immediately put 3 quarters in them and keep these jeans until I throw them out. We would not say that “Those jeans have 3 quarters in them when belonging to me” is a law of nature, but it takes the form of a complete regularity. Even if the jeans lasted until the heat death of the universe and always had 3 quarters in them, we wouldn’t say it is a law that they do.)
Regularities of the kind you describe would very plausibly not be the axioms of the best system for any vocabulary we care about. Adding the jeans regularity to the list of axioms in a system would give up simplicity for a trivial gain in information content.
So it comes down to laws being separated from other regularities because of some ratio of parsimony to information? Without some reason to declare a particular boundary on that, that seems like a rather arbitrary distinction.
Oh, I don’t pretend to be presenting an explanation for the existence of regularities. I don’t think any philosophical account of the laws of nature can do that. The right sort of response to a question like “Why does this regularity exist?” is going to come from science. It’s going to appeal to some deeper theoretical understanding of the relevant system. All-purpose philosophical explanations like “Because it is a law of nature” or “Because of the causal structure of the universe” aren’t really explanations at all. I think one of the reasons for the persistence of the prescriptive view of laws is the illusory promise of a universal explanation of regularity. Once we give up the hope that philosophy is going to save us from the unavoidable curse of unexplained explainers, we can set about the business of figuring out the actual scientific role of the concept “laws of nature”.
So I’m not picking any of the bad answers you propose to the question of why there is a regularity. I don’t think you can get any useful answer at that level of generality. The right answer is going to depend on what regularity you’re talking about and is going to look like science, not philosophy.
Interesting. How do you get around the problem that not all regularities are something we would consider a law of nature, even when generalizable? (Trivial example: I buy a pair of jeans and immediately put 3 quarters in them and keep these jeans until I throw them out. We would not say that “Those jeans have 3 quarters in them when belonging to me” is a law of nature, but it takes the form of a complete regularity. Even if the jeans lasted until the heat death of the universe and always had 3 quarters in them, we wouldn’t say it is a law that they do.)
Regularities of the kind you describe would very plausibly not be the axioms of the best system for any vocabulary we care about. Adding the jeans regularity to the list of axioms in a system would give up simplicity for a trivial gain in information content.
So it comes down to laws being separated from other regularities because of some ratio of parsimony to information? Without some reason to declare a particular boundary on that, that seems like a rather arbitrary distinction.