ABSTRACT
Regularity is explained in terms of laws of nature that determine the events occurring in the world or the regular associations that can be found between properties, or between natural kinds and their properties. The source of such laws remains philosophically controversial, however, and it is even controversial that there are any real laws of nature at all. The most metaphysically thorough attempt to construct a naturalistic account of laws is the so-called DTA theory, named after Dretske, Tooley and Armstrong, who developed similar accounts simultaneously but independently. The DTA theory comes at the price of accepting a realist theory of universals, though some think that in any case there are independent reasons for being a realist about universals. The notion of a disposition is familiar from examples such as fragility, elasticity and solubility, which are commonplace, macroscopic dispositions, the sort which even non-philosophers will talk about and attribute, as properties, to objects.
