Abstract

It is commonly thought that that the best system account of lawhood ((Mill (1843), Ramsey (1978)[fp. 1928], Lewis (1973)) makes available a nice explanation for why laws are ‘distinctively appropriate targets of scientific inquiry’ (Hall, 2015). The explanation takes the following general form: laws are especially valuable for agents like us because they efficiently encode a lot of valuable (non-nomic) information in a tractable format. The goal of this paper is to challenge this style of explanation: I argue that the general principle it presupposes is in conflict with our best account of practical rationality. After considering and rejecting a number of proposals for dissolving the tension, I conclude that BSA proponents may need to scale back the explanatory ambitions of their theory; in particular, they may need to give up the hope of non-circular explanations of the value of nomic information. I end by outlining some challenges for the humean world-view that results after this shift.