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Faraday made this remark even before the laws of electricity had all been discovered. Nevertheless, he was utterly confident that all electric phenomena are covered by laws and that all other forces are too indeed, apparently, that the laws cover every kind of situation that every possible kind of thing can manage to get into. The laws are "complete;" there are no gaps in their coverage. If the laws are in fact complete, then is this merely a peculiarity of the actual laws? Or is the laws's completeness metaphysically compulsory? That is the question I shall investigate. In section 2, I shall offer a provisional characterization of what it would be for the laws to be complete. In section 3, I will try to capture some reasons for supposing that the laws must be complete. I will also argue that neither David Lewis's best-system account nor David Armstrong's relations-among-universals account of laws entails that the laws must be complete. If the laws's completeness is an important part of the idea that the laws govern the universe, then an important (but heretofore neglected) criterion of adequacy for any metaphysical analysis of natural law is that it account for the laws's completeness. Since standard analyses of natural law fail to do so, there is an opportunity more...

Why should science be so interested in discovering whether p is a law over and above whether p is true? The answer may involve the laws' relation to counterfactuals: p is a law iff p would still have obtained under any counterfactual supposition that is consistent with the laws. But unless we already understand why science is especially concerned with the laws, we cannot explain why science is especially interested in what would have happened under those counterfactual suppositions consistent with the laws. It is argued that the laws form the only non-trivially "stable" set, where "stability" is invariance under a certain range of counterfactual suppositions not itself defined by reference to the laws. It is then explained why science should be so interested in identifying a non-trivially "stable" set: because of stability's relation to the best set of "inductive more...