Categorical Monism, Laws, and the Inference Problem

Abstract

A well-known difculty that afects all accounts of laws of nature according to which the latter are higher-order facts involving relations between universals (the so-called DTA accounts, from Dretske in Philosophy of Science 44:248–268, 1977; Tooley in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7:667–698, 1977 and Armstrong (What is a Law of Nature?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983)) is the Inference Problem: how can laws construed in that way determine the frst-order regularities that we fnd in the actual world? Bird (Analysis 65:147–55, 2005) has argued that there is no solution to the Inference Problem which is consistent with both categorical monism (that is, the view that all natural properties are categorical) and basic tenets of Armstrong’s account of the laws of nature. This paper shows that, given Armstrong’s view about laws as frst-order structural universals whose instantiation ‘produce’ nomic regularities and under specifc plausible metaphysical assumptions concerning nomic relations which are consistent with a broadly construed DTA approach to laws, there is no extra difculty regarding the Inference Problem in a categorical monistic context besides the ones that beset structural universals in general.