I Tensed the Laws and the Laws Won: Non-Eternalist Humeanism

• Main Author: Marius Backmann
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Estadual de Campinas
• Series: Manuscrito
• Subjects: Metaphysics of time; Laws of nature; Humeanism; Growing block view
• Online Access: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-60452016000400255&lng=en&tlng=en

ABSTRACT In this paper, I propose a variant of a Humean account of laws called "Open Future Humeanism" (OFH), which holds that since the laws supervene partly on future events, there are at any instant infinitely many possible future courses of events. I argue that if one wants to take the openness of the future that OFH proposes ontologically serious, then OFH is best represented within a growing block view of time. I further discuss some of OFH's problems which stem from the fact that in this view, there are no laws as long as time progresses. These problems can be solved by adding a temporal operator to the laws, so that at any instant, we get a set of tensed laws which held up to and including that instant.