Abstract

It has been nearly a decade and a half since Fred Dretske, David Armstrong and Michael Tooley, having each rejected the Regularity theory,independently proposed that natural laws are grounded in a second-orderrelation that somehow binds together universals.' (l shall call this the‘DTA theory’). In this way they sought to overcome the major - andnotorious — shortcomings of every version of the Regularity theory: howto provide truth conditions for laws that lack instances; how to distinguish laws from accidental generalizations; how to provide truth conditions for the counterfactuals and disposition statements that laws apparently ‘support’; how to justify inductive inferences from past events tolaws and future events. For each of these puzzles, an apparently key element in the solution seems to be missing from Regularity theories. Thatmissing element is a genuine connection, a relation with more than merelyspatial and/or temporal content, linking the antecedent of a law to itsconsequent. Once such an additional objective element - however understood — is admitted to be essential to the analysis of laws, one is forcedto give up the idea that the logical form of laws can be given in terms ofquantifiers ranging over events or states of alfairs, and truth-functions.