A New Reading of The Second Analogy: The Nomologically Determined Object View

Here I sketch and suggest a reading of Kant's main argument in the Second Analogy—call it the “nomologically determined object” view—that avoids shortcomings both of the "looseness of fit" view and Friedman's Newtonian view while extracting a conception of particular empirical laws of nature untouched by the famous non sequitur objection. Causality is a necessary principle of nature as such and particular empirical laws of nature are necessary for one and the same reason: “changing in such and such manner” is the form of the only possible mark by means of which we individuate any possible object of cognition and hence discover further determinations that constitute (the state of) any possible object that changes in such and such manner. In short: objects necessarily obey particular causal laws because a distinctive manner of changing determines what states of what sensible objects change in that distinctive way—in other words, empirical causal laws and their objects are coindividuated. As I show in closing, such laws need not be deterministic, and the non sequitur objection, recast in light of this result, further helps identify how Kant mistakenly though understandably thought that they must be.