Description

Carl Hoefer (ICREA - U Barcelona): "Natural kinds, laws, and modalities: lessons from post-Twin-Earth science and philosophy". 

June 16, 2025. 15:00

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, room 2.

Abstract:
In a paper co-authored by Genoveva Martí (Hoefer & Martí 2019), we defended the Kripke-Putnam thesis that water is essentially composed of H2O molecules, i.e., that there is no world in which the substance we call ‘water’ exists but is not composed mostly of H2O molecules. But we agreed with Putnam that it can be hard to know what to say about imagined possible worlds in which the physical (and hence chemical) laws are different in certain ways. In this talk I will explore some of the speculative ways in which physicists investigate what would be the case in such “counternomic" worlds, and how these speculations interact with the nature of water and other natural kinds, as well as with powers, dispositions, and other denizens of folk physics and chemistry. I will use these explorations to motivate some polemical lessons that I believe we should draw for the debates about the metaphysics of laws.