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    A Humean best-system law that is accidentally true cannot... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→The laws of nature are those generalisations in the collection of truths that best satisfy the three measures of strength, simplicity, and fit.

    A Humean best-system law that is accidentally true cannot distinguish between genuine laws and cosmic coincidences sharing the same axiomatic role.

    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.If a law is accidentally true, it matches reality by chance, not by expressing genuine necessity or causal structure underlying phenomena.
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    • 2.Best-system accounts identify laws by logical elegance and informativeness, criteria that cosmic coincidences can equally satisfy.
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    • 3.Without a non-accidental truth condition, best-system laws lack the metaphysical grounding that distinguishes nomological from merely statistical regularities.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Accidental truth is epistemically inaccessible: we cannot determine from within a system whether its axioms are accidentally true, so the distinction is pragmatically idle.
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    • 2.Best-system laws need only systematize our observations successfully; their metaphysical source is explanatorily irrelevant to their law-like role.
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    • 3.Even accidentally true laws ground counterfactuals and support inductive inference better than mere coincidences, preserving their functional distinction.
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    Related

    Accidental truth is epistemically inaccessible: we cannot determine from within ...Best-system accounts identify laws by logical elegance and informativeness, crit...Best-system laws need only systematize our observations successfully; their meta...Even accidentally true laws ground counterfactuals and support inductive inferen...
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    If a law is accidentally true, it matches reality by chance, not by expressing g...The laws of nature are those generalisations in the collection of truths that be...Without a non-accidental truth condition, best-system laws lack the metaphysical...

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