(2019-03-07, 03:31 PM)Laird Wrote: It's obliviousness like this that makes it not worth engaging with you further. You don't seem to understand the implications of that which you say. You are the one arguing for nomological necessity, but when offered the opportunity to make a cogent argument for it, you instead say something that utterly undercuts it.
How could we distinguish a nomologically necessary law from an accidentally true generalization? I'm working from the pragmatic viewpoint that descriptive laws are nothing more than our best guess based on observations (and are not prescriptive in any way). That situation does not allow us to make the distinction. We would have to prove that there are no exceptions to the law. Or we would have to prove that every event X happens according to the law even though it is not necessary that they all do. How can we do that?
Also, this issue doesn't matter if we are going to adopt your (apparent) viewpoint that laws are metaphysical necessities that apply to all possible worlds. But I may be misunderstanding you in this regard.
~~ Paul
If the existence of a thing is indistinguishable from its nonexistence, we say that thing does not exist. ---Yahzi