ABSTRACT
I originally thought that wholism and nomological machines offered alternative answers to this challenge. Michael Esfeld, I think correctly, points out that my nomological machines story is itself a wholistic story. Nomological machines are imbedded in and interact with the rest of the hugely diverse and less systematically interacting world. He also points out, again I think correctly, that it is hard to tell the pure wholistic story-the one without nomological machines-without advertising to a systematic theory underneath. Indeed my own examples of how we might have highly successful theories that are nevertheless totally “wrong” all seem to depend on there being a “right” theory underneath. Nor would I wish to find myself having to maintain that this underlying theory must somehow remain inaccessible to us. I still believe that there is a proper wholistic story to be told without universal laws at all. But my own best efforts I think have instead been with nomological machines, which do presuppose capacity laws-as opposed to regularity laws-and that are in many cases very wide in scope, if not universal, e.g., the capacity law that masses attract other masses.
