Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Academic
Description
The Limits of Humeanism
Humeans take reality to be devoid of ‘necessary connections’: things just happen. Causality and laws of nature are to be understood in terms of what ‘just happens’, not vice versa. Here the Humean needs some conception of what it is that ‘just happens’ – a conception of the Humean mosaic. By exploring different such conceptions, I delineate the limits of Humeanism in two ways: first, only conceptions of the mosaic of a very specific kind form a suitable basis for the Humean project; and second, taking the Humean way of thinking to its limit results in a rejection of the whole idea of such a mosaic – and hence of Humean mosaic-based accounts of anything. For concreteness, I develop my argument in dialogue with Humean accounts of laws of nature, but it applies to any Humean account involving a Humean mosaic.