Out of curiosity, do you have on hand any good articles on how Humeans (metaphysically, epistemically, etc.) distinguish ‘mere patterns’ from ‘capital-p Patterns’? (Aside from anthropocentric concepts like explanatory reducibility.)
Many Humeans believe that any particular instance of a salient pattern of recurrences is explained by the existence and salience of the pattern, so laws are explanatory.
‘Salience’ is usually an anthropocentric / psychological concept. What is meant by it here? I ask because we have to be careful not to allow non-Humean ‘salience-making’ properties. If salience is something metaphysical that makes certain patterns objectively ‘special’ and ‘lawful’ and ‘regular’, then I’d normally think of salience as non-Humean. On the other hand, if ‘salience’ is a non-unifying brute fact (‘brute correlation,’ ‘unexplainable recurrence’, ‘irreducible coincidence’, etc.), or is somehow relative to our human projects and interests and standards, then I’d normally think of it as Humean. Does this jibe with your experience?
Also, a number of Humeans do cite metaphysical humility as an advantage of their account of laws.
Yes. And ‘metaphysical humility’ here means ‘metaphysical commitment to a smaller domain of entities or kinds’. My point was just to hammer home that it doesn’t mean ‘avoiding doing difficult speculative metaphysics’ or ‘skeptically withholding judgment’ or ‘treating lawfulness as a human construct’ or ‘positivistically denying that non-Humean laws are intelligible’; the latter four options preclude Humeanism as much as they preclude anti-Humeanism, and my worry was that some positivism-friendly LessWrongers would misconstrue Humeanism as somehow unmetaphysical, rather than just as metaphysically sparse.
(Though, again, this is complicated; non-Humeans claim that Humeanism is metaphysically profligate, say, because brute correlations that continue to recur, and recur, and recur are more startling than unitarily ‘law-governed’ recurrences. Cf. Eliezer’s concerns with treating our universe as metaphysically first-order.)
A side-note, since it hasn’t come up: A lot of people in the Humeanism debate unpack the dispute modally. On this conception, Humeans consider the laws and regularities of nature contingent, while non-Humeans believe that there is some sort of metaphysical necessity behind our world’s regularities. I don’t think this is a very enlightening way to frame the debate, and in most contexts I’d be happy to grant that you could be a necessitarian Humean; but it’s an extremely common form of the debate, so it should be kept in mind.
Out of curiosity, do you have on hand any good articles on how Humeans (metaphysically, epistemically, etc.) distinguish ‘mere patterns’ from ‘capital-p Patterns’? (Aside from anthropocentric concepts like explanatory reducibility.)
The classic neo-Humean account is David Lewis’s. It’s described in the SEP here. I also wrote a post about it here. The account does appeal to the simplicity of descriptions, which is arguably a somewhat anthropocentric concept, but I see that as a feature, not a bug. The laws are ways of efficiently organizing our understanding of the universe, not fundamental mind-independent entities (see the last section of my post). I don’t think Lewis would agree with my characterization in this regard, I should say.
Out of curiosity, do you have on hand any good articles on how Humeans (metaphysically, epistemically, etc.) distinguish ‘mere patterns’ from ‘capital-p Patterns’? (Aside from anthropocentric concepts like explanatory reducibility.)
‘Salience’ is usually an anthropocentric / psychological concept. What is meant by it here? I ask because we have to be careful not to allow non-Humean ‘salience-making’ properties. If salience is something metaphysical that makes certain patterns objectively ‘special’ and ‘lawful’ and ‘regular’, then I’d normally think of salience as non-Humean. On the other hand, if ‘salience’ is a non-unifying brute fact (‘brute correlation,’ ‘unexplainable recurrence’, ‘irreducible coincidence’, etc.), or is somehow relative to our human projects and interests and standards, then I’d normally think of it as Humean. Does this jibe with your experience?
Yes. And ‘metaphysical humility’ here means ‘metaphysical commitment to a smaller domain of entities or kinds’. My point was just to hammer home that it doesn’t mean ‘avoiding doing difficult speculative metaphysics’ or ‘skeptically withholding judgment’ or ‘treating lawfulness as a human construct’ or ‘positivistically denying that non-Humean laws are intelligible’; the latter four options preclude Humeanism as much as they preclude anti-Humeanism, and my worry was that some positivism-friendly LessWrongers would misconstrue Humeanism as somehow unmetaphysical, rather than just as metaphysically sparse.
(Though, again, this is complicated; non-Humeans claim that Humeanism is metaphysically profligate, say, because brute correlations that continue to recur, and recur, and recur are more startling than unitarily ‘law-governed’ recurrences. Cf. Eliezer’s concerns with treating our universe as metaphysically first-order.)
A side-note, since it hasn’t come up: A lot of people in the Humeanism debate unpack the dispute modally. On this conception, Humeans consider the laws and regularities of nature contingent, while non-Humeans believe that there is some sort of metaphysical necessity behind our world’s regularities. I don’t think this is a very enlightening way to frame the debate, and in most contexts I’d be happy to grant that you could be a necessitarian Humean; but it’s an extremely common form of the debate, so it should be kept in mind.
The classic neo-Humean account is David Lewis’s. It’s described in the SEP here. I also wrote a post about it here. The account does appeal to the simplicity of descriptions, which is arguably a somewhat anthropocentric concept, but I see that as a feature, not a bug. The laws are ways of efficiently organizing our understanding of the universe, not fundamental mind-independent entities (see the last section of my post). I don’t think Lewis would agree with my characterization in this regard, I should say.