Preface
Chapter 1: Laws Form Counterfactually Stable Sets
1. Welcome
2. Their necessity sets the laws apart
3. The laws's persistence under counterfactuals
4. Nomic preservation
5. Beyond nomic preservation
6. A host of related problems: triviality, circularity, arbitrariness
7. Sub-nomic stability
8. No nonmaximal set containing accidents possesses sub-nomic stability
9. How two sub-nomically stable sets must be related: multiple strata of natural laws
10. Why the laws would still have been laws
11. Conclusion: laws form stable sets
Chapter 2: Natural Necessity
1. Our goal in this chapter
2. The Euthyphro question
3. David Lewis's "Best-System Account"
4. Lewis's account and the laws's supervenience
5. The Euthyphro question returns
6. Are all relative necessities created equal?
7. The modality principle
8. A proposal for distinguishing genuine from merely relative modalities
9. Borrowing a strategy from Chapter 1
10. Necessity as maximal invariance
11. The laws form a system
12. Scientific essentialism squashes the pyramid
13. Why there is a natural ordering of the genuine modalities
14. Why there is a natural ordering of the genuine modalities
Chapter 3: Three Payoffs of My Account
1. The itinerary
2. Could the laws of nature change?
3. Why the laws are immutable
4. Symmetry principles as meta-laws
5. The symmetry meta-laws form a nomically stable set
6. The relation between chancy facts and deterministic laws
7. How to account for the relation
Chapter 4: A World of Subjunctives
1. What if the lawmakers were subjunctive facts?
2. The lawmakers's regress
3. Stability
4. Avoiding adhocery
5. Instantaneous rates of change and the causal explanation problem
6. Et in Arcadia ego
7. The rule of law
8. Why the laws must be complete
9. Envoi: Am I cheating?
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