The Bounds of Experience: Representationalism and the Laws of Appearance

Here I defend representationalism against an important objection: the laws of appearance. The problem is that the laws seem necessary, but representationalist explanations of the laws give us no reason to think that they are. In the first part, I argue that the laws only seem necessary but are not. I argue that the laws seem necessary because we cannot imagine violations of them, and we cannot explain this inability. Since we have an explanation of why the laws seem necessary, we have no reason to posit a modal fact. In the second part, I argue that even if one establishes the metaphysical necessity of the laws by restricting them to normal humans, representationalism is not undermined either since the metaphysical necessity of the laws will be explained by contingent facts about normal human vision.