Comments Elsewhere

Richard,

If I accept your claims of non-supervenience, it’s unclear to me that this demonstrates anything remarkable about natural laws. It would demonstrate nothing, in particular, about whether natural laws apply necessarily or only contingently to the stuff our world is in fact made of (lead, gold, atoms, quarks, matter, whatever). At the strongest it would demonstrate that there are possible worlds made of alien stuff that behaves according to correspondingly alien laws. But it tells us nothing about the modal status of “Lead does not transmute into gold just by being put into such-and-such a shape.” Since pretty much all of our natural laws are already expressed using natural kind terms, it’d be hard for world-descriptions that systematically exclude them to tell us anything about the natural laws.

Second, why should we accept that a “purely non-dispositional account of the world” is even possible? What sort of purely non-dispositional properties do you have in mind? As an exercise, just try describing what qualities water and XYZ have in common with each other, without mentioning any dispositional properties at all. (Transparency, tastelessness, odorlessness, wetness, etc. are all qualities typically mentioned here, but none of them will do for your purposes: they all involve dispositions. Water, for example, is odorless whether you’re actually sniffing it or not, and XYZ would still be transparent even when it’s dark.)