Abstract

Dretske’s influential account of laws stands in sharp contrast to the classical accounts of Hempel, Nagel, Carnap, and Braithwaite. I will, in the following, refer to these somewhat different accounts as “the standard view”. Dretske’s view has been seen as marking a striking shift away from that view, and the beginning of a series of new non-Humean accounts. His account of laws forcefully declared thatLaws are relations between, properties, quantities, magnitudes, or features that are expressed by certain predicates.The relations in each law are extensional, and can vary from law to law,Laws are singular sentences rather than general, andThe statement of the law All F’s are G will not change it’s truth-value if any co-referential expression replaces “F”, “G”, or both. However the result of that replacement may not be a law. This feature is, he, misleadingly refers to as “the opacity of laws”.With the exception of the first claim, the remaining ones appear to be a wholesale repudiation of the received view about laws. They are not friendly amendments. If true, they cut deeply into the received view. We turn therefore to a detailed consideration of them.