Dispositional Essentialism and the Possibility of a Law-Abiding Miracle

An objection to dispositional essentialism has been that it yields an implausible semantics for counterfactuals if determinism happens to be true. I claim that an adequate remedy to this objection would be to endorse the metaphysical possibility of 'law-abiding miracles', i.e., uncaused spontaneous events. This proposal entails that determinism de jure is meta-physically impossible; I argue that this is not a serious disadvantage. I discuss consequences of the proposal for the logical form of laws, and consider a possible objection to the proposal on epistemic grounds.     

Mind and Miracles

Miracles are real or imagined events that contradict our intuitive expectations of how entities normally behave. Miracles in the weak sense are unexplained counterintuitive events. Miracles in the strong sense are counterintuitive events we explain by referring to the counterintuitive agents and forces of various religious traditions. Such explanations result from the fact that our minds treat half–understood information by carrying out searches in the memory, trying to connect new information with something already known. This is cognitively the most economical way of dealing with new information: we obtain the maximum of relevance at minimal processing cost.     

Spoilage and Squatting: A Lockean Argument

Res Publica - John Locke is generally seen as an unequivocal defender of private property. However, taken normatively, certain aspects of his argument leave room for interesting loopholes with...     

Miracles and the case for theism

I would like to thank Keith Parsons for reviving my interest in this topic, and Robert McKim, Patrick Maher, Hugh Chandler, Jordan Howard Sobel, and William Alston for helpful remarks concerning previous versions of this paper.     

Miracles of perception

This paper draws a bird's eye view of various counter-intuitive characteristics of perception. Peculiar is that perception is a both tool and topic of its study. As a consequence, its output is easily mistaken for its input. Furthermore, its output is characterized by remarkable Gestalt features, such as mutual dependence of stimulus elements and detour solutions. Detour solutions require a complex perception process of testing countless optional pattern interpretations against a criterion. Likelihood is a plausible criterion for reasoning. For perception, however, the simplicity criterion is more appropriate. The consideration is that reasoning aims at establishing properties of distal objects whereas perception aims at establishing objects from proximal properties. The role of knowledge in perception seems plausible but often leads to conflicts. For instance, the assumption that knowledge about handedness is present in pattern representations conflicts with image mirror-image discrimination data. Moreover, knowledge does not provide an anchor for subjective time direction, but a Gestalt quality does.     

Essentialism and the Necessity of the Laws of Nature

In this paper I discuss and evaluate different arguments for the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. I conclude that essentialist arguments from the nature of natural kinds fail to establish that essences are ontologically more basic than laws, and fail to offer an a priori argument for the necessity of all causal laws. Similar considerations carry across to the argument from the dispositionalist view of properties, which may end up placing unreasonable constraints on property identity across possible worlds. None of my arguments preclude the possibility that the laws may turn out to be metaphysically necessary after all, but I argue that this can only be established by a posteriori scientific investigation. I therefore argue for what may seem to be a surprising conclusion: that a fundamental metaphysical question – the modal status of laws of nature – depends on empirical facts rather than purely on a priori reasoning.