Laws of Nature

This chapter investigates how an ontology of power and influence might help us answer the question ‘What is it to be a law of nature?’ In particular, the chapter investigates how this ontology might help us develop the dispositional essentialist account of laws as it is presented by Alexander Bird. It is argued that Bird's derivation of laws from dispositions only works if we combine the view that some properties are powers in Bird's sense (they have an essential dispositional nature that is modally fixed) with the view that the relevant properties are powers in the sense developed in this book (they are dispositions to manifest causal influence).