Causation and Laws of Nature (eBook)

I. Laws And Causes.- Making Sense of Laws of Physics.- II. Scientific Essentialism.- Causal Powers and Laws of Nature.- Comment on Ellis.- Response to David Armstrong.- Scientific Ellisianism.- Bigelow's Worries About Scientific Essentialism.- The Naturalness Theory of Laws.- Nomic Necessity and Natural States: Comment on the Leckey-Bigelow Theory of Laws.- III. Laws, Quantities and Dispositions.- Are the Laws of Nature Deductively Closed?.- Laws of Nature as Relations Between Quantities?.- Real Law in Peirce's "Pragmaticism" (Or: How Scholastic Realism Met the Scientific Method).- Finkish Dispositions.- Comments on David Lewis: 'Finkish Dispositions'.- Laws and Cosmology.- Comment on Smart.- IV. Causation and Theories of Causation.- The Open Door: Counterfactual versus Singularist Theories of Causation.- Causal Dependence and Laws.- Causation is the Transfer of Information.- Good Connections: Causation and Causal Processes.- Probabilistic Causal Structure.- Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Conceptions of Causation.- The Role of History in Microphysics.- No Interaction Without Prior Correlation: Comment on Huw Price.- Notes on Contributors.