Humeanism, Modality, and the Governing Conception of Natural Laws

A common objection against Humean reductionism about laws is an argument from governing: It is natural to think that laws of nature govern. But in order to govern the laws need to be independent of the phenomena they govern. Hence, Humean laws, which reduce to patterns in the phenomena and so lack this independence, cannot govern. A standard Humean response to this argument is that we should not place much weight on the intuition that laws govern. Non-Humeans, however, reply that the argument does not merely rest on intuitions but that scientific practice presupposes governing. In this paper, we offer a response to this revised challenge to Humeanism by giving a detailed account of the laws’ role in scientific modelling. We argue that while Humean theories indeed cannot capture certain governing-intuitions, they still can make sense of those aspects of science that allegedly motivate governing.