PLAN DE CAPACITACIÓN SOBRE TEORÍA ECONÓMICA PARA DOCENTES DE EBR 1 JUSTIFICACIÓN

As just indicated, there is a model for how we might answer the question of language raised in the last chapter: the Better Best System Account (BBSA). As the BBSA is concerned with offering an alternative to the usual BSA, it makes no mention of symmetries or metalaws. But there is no reason why we could not extend the approach so as to include these. The core insight behind the view – that the original BSA needs adjustments to properly accommodate special science laws and that modifying the vocabulary used is the first step to making these adjustments – has been recognised by various philosophers. In what follows I will largely be following the presentation of the account favoured by Cohen and Callender, as I take it to be the most widely known version (and the source of the account’s name).195

The central change to the BSA that Cohen and Callender make is to remove the claim that any particular choice of basic predicates or properties is picked out by the world as objectively special. There is no sense in which any language that we choose to formulate systems of laws in is better than any other – at least, that is, no sense that does not make appeal to our particular contingent interests or abilities. As an example of this, we might compare a language with green and blue to one with bleen and grue. The former language might be easier for us to work with (and so is special to precisely that extent) or come to mind more immediately, but this does not mean that there is anything objectively better about it when it comes to picking a language to formulate laws in.

In their paper, Cohen and Callender associate the BBSA with the adoption of an attitude of ‘explosive realism’ concerning natural kinds. Rather than there being one objectively privileged way to carve up the world at the joints, there are many different carvings, none of which mark out objective joints better than any other. It just happens that some of these carvings are more useful to us than others. (Compare this to unrestricted mereological composition: the moon and the pennies in my pocket might compose an object, but it is not one that we therefore need to

195 _{For examples of this move, see Roberts (1999), Halpin (2003), Schrenk (2008), Schrenk}

pay any special attention to.) This, they argue, is more amenable to empiricism and what scientists are doing when they posit new fundamental kinds. Further, it will give us an account of lawhood that includes more than just the fundamental laws of physics. The standard BSA is unable to incorporate the laws of sciences like biology, since the kinds that they appeal to are not fundamental ones. As perfectly natural properties correspond to only fundamental kinds, systems of special science laws suffer from the same problem Lange identifies for systems of metalaws: they score badly on simplicity and so will not be the best.196 _{But an account of lawhood that is}

not tied to natural properties avoids this worry entirely.

That said, it is worth mentioning that we do not have to be as thorough-going as Cohen and Callender’s rejection of natural properties. All that is required for their account of laws is that systems of laws don’t have to be stated in the language of natural properties. It’s an entirely separate matter as to whether we reject such properties altogether. While we might see no need for them to be as closely tied to laws as they are in the BSA, we might think that they do useful work in other areas of metaphysics. Recall the extensive list given in the previous chapter of uses that Lewis put them to! It might initially seem surprising to have an account where the laws are not tied to that kind of fundamental properties while still accepting their existence, but it is not incoherent. And if we adopt the view of laws that the BBSA urges, the sense of surprise is diminished.

So to the details of this view. The nature of the laws is still given by the system which best balances the competing virtues of strength and simplicity. However, rather than having to be stated in a single specific language, systems of laws can be formulated in any language. Lawhood, then, becomes a language-relative notion. We might still take which regularities are the laws to be an objective matter; we do not get to freely choose what the laws are. But this is a rather constrained notion of objectivity, since they are objective only relative to a choice of language. Each language has its own

196 _{That is only half the problem, of course. The BSA also demands regularities be}

exceptionless and so encounters difficulty with ceteris paribus laws. See Schrenk (2014) for a suggestion that allows both the BSA and the BBSA cope with such laws. For worries about whether the BBSA copes any better than the BSA with ceteris paribus laws, see Backmann and Reutlinger (2014).

competition for best system, and different languages might (and almost certainly will) have different laws. Some languages might not even recognise any laws, should they lack the resources to describe the world’s regularities. Other languages, with overlap in their basic kinds, might judge the same system to be best and so have the same laws.

This is how the BBSA is able to acknowledge laws of sciences other than physics. Pretend for the moment that our current science is complete and that we have discovered what the laws are. Then if we pick a language whose basic kinds include the kinds used in physics, the best system will be one which recognises the same laws that physicists do. So the laws – relative to the kind of language used in physics – will be the laws of physics. But we could also pick a language whose basic kinds include the kinds used in biology. Then the laws – relative to the kind of language used in biology – will be the laws of biology. A systematisation of the laws of physics will not be judged best relative to this second language as such a system will not be simple in that language. Rather, its properties will appear to be horribly gerrymandered.

We do not need to view the special sciences as fully autonomous from physics in order to make use of the BBSA. As an example, recall that Albert and Loewer’s advocacy of the Past Hypothesis, the claim that the world started in a low entropy state, runs into a snag when combined with the orthodox BSA. Entropy is not a fundamental property and so the Past Hypothesis will look wildly disjunctive when translated into the language of perfectly natural properties. A move to a form of the BBSA could therefore be motivated for them: if we consider the best system for a language that includes entropy among its basic predicates, it becomes plausible that statements of the Past Hypothesis will be simple as intended. Although Albert and Loewer do not appeal to the BBSA, doing so would allow them to avoid the issues that are associated with either ignoring the problem or stipulating that the correct language for the best system is one that includes entropy. That said, more work would need to be done here to get the result they desire: that the special sciences end up being derivable from physics.

The BBSA does not solve the problem of cross-language comparisons as do those who stipulate a favoured language. Rather, it completely rejects the problem. For this is only a problem if we think that what the laws really are is independent of language. Then it makes sense to look for a single once-and-for-all best system. But without such a conception of lawhood, there is no need to compare systems in different languages; even if doing so were possible, we would not discover anything deeper about the world by making the comparisons.

Similarly, there is no need at this level to reject languages that include predicates like F: predicates true of all and only those things in our world. Languages which include predicates like that will have uninteresting best systems. But so what? That system has no privileged place above any other. Its disconnection from empirical inquiry is clear: science will not discover that ∀𝑥 𝐹𝑥 is our one and only law because scientists do not seek to understand the world through the use of kinds that predicates like F pick out. So we can tell from the armchair which systems will be best in certain languages, but should not be concerned because we simply lack any non- philosophical interest in these languages.

Might the standards for judging which system is best differ across different languages? They might, although whether one wants to defend that depends on how committed one is to the objectivity of the standards in the first place. Allowing the standards to vary sits well with a ‘look to science’ approach. Since there is little a priori reason to think that the standards applied in, say, biology are the same as those in physics or sociology, there is some reason to want the standards to vary. We could then say that the standards are whatever those employed by the relevant scientific field are. It is for the scientists to pick their own standards: neither philosophy nor the universe nor even any other scientific field forces a choice upon them. This respects the autonomy of the various sciences.

Varying standards bring with them some issues. For one, it makes the laws dependent on our choices. This looks worse for the standard BSA than for the BBSA of course. With laws relativized to languages, we already get a plethora of laws. That they depend on our choice of standards does not change anything deeper about the world. Lewis may have been worried by ratbag idealists trying the change the laws

by changing their thinking, but the worry loses a lot of its force when laws are deprived of a metaphysically active role.197 _{What does it matter if we pick out some}

descriptions of patterns as more important than others? The distribution of fundamental properties doesn’t change according to our choices! Nor is it clear that, given such a distribution, there is sufficient variation in the standards that could be applied to make the laws come out as anything we want. Making the account doubly relative would result in the laws depending on both language and standards choices. Perhaps this is pragmatically defensible: some choices of standards would output some rather odd laws, just as some choices of language do. But just as we are not interested in every one of the languages that law candidates can be formulated in, there is no reason to think that we would be interested in every one of judgement standards that could be applied.

There’s more that ought to be said in defence of varied standards, but I think that indicates the direction that one ought to look. More problematically, we might worry about our access to the standards in question. If we pick the standards, then the problem is that there exist languages, and so candidate systems, which no human has considered. What standards apply there? If each language has its own objective standard, then we lose the sense in which we are letting each science decide how best to find its laws. There is no good reason to think that every scientific field will chance upon the correct standards. (And how would we know that, for example, the geologists are using the objectively correct standards but the cosmologists just can’t get it right?) Finally, disagreement. Which standards are in play when a scientific field disagrees (explicitly or implicitly) on the standards? Or when the practices of that community change? None of this is to say that there is no similar problem for the standard BSA. On the contrary, just how objective the BSA standards are is a matter of debate, and Lewis’ defence of their objectivity is far from confidence-inspiring. This is not the first time that someone has worried about whether scientists are discovering what the Humean takes to be laws! I take the upshot of this to be that the issue of objectivity of standards in the BBSA is similar to the issue of objectivity in the BSA. If one is happy that the balancing of strength and simplicity is not

dependent on us, then the language relativism move need not change anything. If one started with concerns, then the BBSA provides an opportunity to double down on what will look to be an unavoidable relativism of the laws.

Let us set these unresolved issues to one side. Since the problem that the BSA has with metalaws is analogous to the problem it has with special science laws, it should be clear how the extension of the BBSA goes. Instead of there being a single non- relative best system (or tie of a few non-relative best systems) that gives us the metalaws, we can make the account of metalaws language-relative. For a given system of laws, we can use many different languages to formulate the metalaws of those laws. Relative to each of those languages there will be a competition for the best second-order system. If we wish to recover the metalaws that physics recognises, then we had better not choose a language which has predicates corresponding to the basic kinds of economics. That choice might recover some striking regularities in the world, but it lacks the resources to pick out the symmetry principles that physicists care about. Similarly, we should not choose a language with basic predicates only for perfectly natural properties. Such a language will have as its best system regularities that physics does not recognise for the reason that Lange identified. But since there is no requirement to choose that language, no sense in which it is objectively better than the other choices, there is no problem with this. The problem that Lange discovered with this approach to incorporating symmetries into our account of laws simply does not occur.

It is theoretically possible to preserve the original BSA when we are dealing with laws, but use this Extended Better Best System Account (EBBSA) to deal with metalaws. But such an account is not an appealing one. Doing this would mean claiming that the laws which pick out striking regularities in the Mosaic are independent of us and our choice of languages, but that the metalaws which pick out striking regularities in the patterns in the Mosaic are language-dependent. That is a major asymmetry and one that is hard to motivate: nothing like that seems evident in the practice of physics. Such a hybrid account is vulnerable to the (accurate) accusation that it is simply an ad hoc move made to escape Lange’s objection. Language-relativity would be better motivated if it were embraced more

thoroughly. That is, accept Cohen and Callender’s arguments for the BBSA and then incorporate symmetries as metalaws by extending their account of laws in the natural way.