Best-System Laws, Explanation, and Unification

Jan 1, 2023·
Thomas Blanchard
Thomas Blanchard
· 0 min read
Abstract
In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this ‘pragmatic Humean’ research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, I will argue that they have trouble making sense of certain key features of the practice of fundamental physics.
Type
Publication
In Humean Laws for Human Agents, edited by M. Hicks, C. Loew and S. Jaag, Oxford University Press, pp. 215-36
publication
Thomas Blanchard
Authors
Thomas Blanchard
Maître de Conférences en Philosophie

I am Associate Professor in the philosophy department at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy and psychology in the Concepts and Cognition Lab at UC-Berkeley for the Varieties of Understanding Project, an Assistant Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and an Akademischer Rat (roughly equivalent to assistant professor) at the University of Cologne. I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2014.

My research is in the philosophy of science, and focuses mainly on causation, causal modeling and causal explanation. I am interested in a wide variety of issues concerning causation including causal asymmetries, levels of causal explanation, the causal exclusion problem, the epistemology of causal inference, causal cognition, and causal decision theory. My work also investigates the use of certain causal concepts and assumptions in particular sciences such as biology, epidemiology and medicine.