Stable regularities without governing laws?

0507594 - FLÚ 2020 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Filomeno, Aldo
Stable regularities without governing laws?
Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. -, č. 66 (2019), s. 186-197. ISSN 1355-2198. E-ISSN 1879-2502
Grant - others:AV ČR(CZ) AP1602
Program: Akademická prémie - Praemium Academiae
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : Laws of nature * Physical necessity * Non-accidental regularities * Dynamical systems * Complex systems * Method of arbitrary functions
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Impact factor: 1.023, year: 2019
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1355219818300297?via%3Dihub

Can stable regularities be explained without appealing to governing laws or any other modal notion? In this paper, I consider what I will call a “Humean system”-a generic dynamical system without guiding laws-and assess whether it could display stable regularities. First, I present what can be interpreted as an account of the rise of stable regularities, following from Strevens (2003), which has been applied to explain the patterns of complex systems (such as those from meteorology and statistical mechanics). Second, since this account presupposes that the underlying dynamics displays deterministic chaos, I assess whether it can be adapted to cases where the underlying dynamics is not chaotic but truly random-that is, cases where there is no dynamics guiding the time evolution of the system. If this is so, the resulting stable, apparently non-accidental regularities are the fruit of what can be called statistical necessity rather than of a primitive physical necessity.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0298597