ABSTRACT
As philosophical topics, causation and laws of nature have important points of contact. The idea of a law of nature, then, can be seen in part as a sort of generalization of the idea of causation. When thinking about laws of nature, to acknowledge both their connections and their dissimilarities with causation in our conceptual economy. A regularity theory of laws of nature states that laws of nature are regularities, and that there is nothing, or almost nothing, more or less to being a law of nature than being regularity. Probabilistic laws are the other main example of laws that exist without exceptionless regularities. The naive regularity theory (NRT) may be implausible, but it respects an influential metaphysical stance known as Humean supervenience. The necessitation view also helps with the problems of principle. Philosophical treatments of laws of nature sometimes start with an assumption that we have an intuitive grasp of what a law of nature.
