TLS: On Laws of Nature

Why do things behave the way they do? Why does salt dissolve in water, why do balls roll downhill, and why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near? In each of these three cases, it is clear that there are some underlying features of reality that explain this regular behaviour: chemical bonding, gravitational attraction,
and the fact that they long to be close to you, respectively. But, like small children - and ph ilosophers are a lot like small children, at least in this regard - we can continue to ask why. Eventually, we hit rock bottom: the philosopher's equi valent of the parent's exasperated answer, '''just because".
At what point do we get to rock bottom? A first pass at an answer is: the point at which our explanation is a fundamental law of nature. But of course we can always ask why the laws of nature are what they are. For the regularity theorist, the universe - luckily for us - happens to work in an incredibly regular way. The laws are simply those regularities that are the most widespread, and the most explanatorily powerful. From a cosmic point of view, the fact that bi rds suddenly appear every time you are near doesn't explain much. Whereas the fact that, as it happens, every time an object with a particular mass and a particular force acting on it accelerates according to Newton's second law of motion, f=ma (imagining for simplicity that this really is a law), explains an awful lot; that's why it's a law. David Armstrong and others have argued that we should instead think of the laws not as generalizing over particular facts - facts about individual objects' behaviour - but as relating properties, or "universals". It doesn't just happen that every time an object with a particular mass and a particular force acting on it accelerates according to f=ma; those particular qualities stand in a relation of necessitation, so that, given that the relation of necessitation obtains (though it is merely
a contingent fact that it does obtain), objects with a given mass and force cannot but accelerate at the appropriate rate....
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