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Full Idea
Armstrong has difficulty explaining how laws entail regularities. There is no real modality in the basic components of the world, but he wants to support counterfactuals. His official position is a kind of fictionalism.
Gist of Idea
Without modality, Armstrong falls back on fictionalism to support counterfactual laws
Source
comment on David M. Armstrong (A World of States of Affairs [1997], 49-51) by Alexander Bird - Nature's Metaphysics 4.4.4
Book Ref
Bird,Alexander: 'Nature's Metaphysics' [OUP 2007], p.96
A Reaction
Armstrong seems to be up against the basic problems that laws won't explain anything if they are merely regularities (assuming they are not decrees of a supernatural force).
| 14429 | Classes are logical fictions, made from defining characteristics [Russell] |
| 9497 | Without modality, Armstrong falls back on fictionalism to support counterfactual laws [Bird on Armstrong] |
| 8909 | Abstractions may well be verbal fictions, in which we ignore some features of an object [Lewis] |
| 10023 | Talk of mirror images is 'encoded fictions' about real facts [Hodes] |
| 8864 | We quantify over events, worlds, etc. in order to make logical possibilities clearer [Yablo] |
| 19494 | Fictionalism allows that simulated beliefs may be tracking real facts [Yablo] |
| 19489 | For me, fictions are internally true, without a significant internal or external truth-value [Yablo] |
| 19490 | Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures [Yablo] |
| 19491 | 'The clouds are angry' can only mean '...if one were attributing emotions to clouds' [Yablo] |
| 10262 | Fictionalism eschews the abstract, but it still needs the possible (without model theory) [Shapiro] |
| 10277 | Structuralism blurs the distinction between mathematical and ordinary objects [Shapiro] |
| 12445 | If fictional objects really don't exist, then they aren't abstract objects [Azzouni] |