Law and Causality

Abstract

Focusing on the problem of so called dispositional properties, the paper confronts the time slice type of ontology which Hume's rejection of the idea of necessary connection seems to amount to with the type whose ultimate entities are persisting and changing objects in the notion of which the transtemporal identity and the kinds of changing are already implied. This ontological scheme is shown to be correlated to the explanations in terms of nature of an object, and since this nature is specified by the actions and reactions, necessary for something to be an object of certain kind, the relation between existence and causal efficiency proves to be analytical. Thus the idea of necessary connection becomes justified both from ontological and epistemological point of view. For the conclusion, some striking nonhumean consequences are developed: regardless of necessary concatenation of natural events it's ultimately impossible to predict the subsequent event since it can never be known which objects we are concerned with - the missing evidence being obtainable from the subsequent event only; all possible worlds are governed by the same natural laws, the change of which would lead to the destruction of our world; there is only one possible world, the only trouble being in the impossibility of determining which one.