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It is not the case that A Humean best-system law that is accidentally true cannot distinguish between genuine laws and cosmic coincidences sharing the same axiomatic role.
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Reasons For
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Reason for
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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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Reasons Against
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Reason against
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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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