Abstract

The most important question in the metaphysics of science is “What is the nature of fundamental laws?”. This paper aims to discuss this question concerning the debate surrounding David Hume’s approach to the problem. According to the Anti-humean view, laws of nature are not regularity or generalization but are relations between universals. Many philosophers support or defend this like Dretske, Armstrong, and Tooley. There are differences between Dretske and Tooley i.e., according to Dretske, the form of laws should be written as: “F-ness à G-ness” but according to Tooley, it can be written as (x)(Fx > Gx). According to Dretske, laws support counterfactual, but according to Tooley, laws doesn’t support counterfactual. According to the Humean view about laws of nature, laws are certain sorts of regularities in particular matters of fact. This paper aims to discuss the debates and approaches of Humean and Anti-Humean regarding laws of nature and further what problems these approaches lead to and what possible responses they could have. There are many objections against humeanism- non-supervenience, explanatory circularity, non-fundamentality, etc, The most common objection to humeanism on which the paper will shed focus on is the “The Circularity problem”. This paper will discuss the problem and responses to it

Keywords

Hume, Laws of Nature, Universals, Anti-Humeanism, circularity problem