​Chapter 4

The regress belonged to argument, and the law came through it intact. A formula stating the transition does not carry it out, which leaves the question of what does. The law may describe a transition occurring on its own, and then the producing goes unexplained. Or a power in things does the producing, and production has been taken as basic rather than explained.

The question can be rejected: there is no producing to explain, only a state, a later state, and a regularity holding between such states; the demand for a causal push is metaphysics inventing work. The position is consistent, at the cost of the contrast it was meant to defend. Causation becomes a pattern in the arrangement of the facts, with no necessity inside it anywhere, and "explained" causation can no longer be set against an "unexplained" act. Freedom rests on a primitive act; this rests on a primitive arrangement. Production disappears from the account, and the symmetry arrives from the far side.

Production can instead be retained as a basic necessity, power, or mechanism. Laws may be mind-independent relations of necessity between properties, and that may be what brings the later state about. The position is coherent, untouched by any regress, and rests on the claim that this is how the world is built. A disposition does more than restate the regularity: it extends to cases that never occur, gathers scattered manifestations under a common property, tells why an object would respond as it does under circumstances that have never arisen, and separates what a thing can do from what it is doing. Ask how a power actualizes its effect and the answer inserts a mechanism or calls the power irreducible; the directedness of a nature toward its effect is where the explanation stops.

Between the blow and the shattering lies a real sequence: momentum is transferred, the material deforms, and bonds fail. Decomposing the large transition into these smaller ones is genuine progress, and each step admits measurement, intervention, and the possibility of being shown wrong. What the account delivers, it delivers relative to transitions accepted below it, and the decomposition ends at a primitive: a fundamental force, the transfer of a conserved quantity, a disposition, or production.

A methodological asymmetry remains, narrower than it looks. The scientific method finds repeatable connections because it is built to find them — a phenomenon must either recur or be identified through repeatable evidential relations before it registers as a causal finding. A unique event may be perfectly caused, but causal method can recognize it only by placing it under a repeatable form. Where a transition adds a determination not fixed by the prior state, the apparatus has no category for it — such an event appears as error, anomaly, miracle, or as a cause not yet identified, and the last reading is always available and always preferred. So whether any underived joint is authored is not a question the method is positioned to settle. Its success shows how much of the world is repeatable, which was never in dispute.

Within the domain of public testing, causal theories are better confirmed, and deservedly. Repetition and intervention are available there, and a theory that survives them has earned its authority. Where they are not, a record of successes underwrites nothing about the case in hand.

The charge that freedom rests on nothing could be made only from a position with nothing underived beneath it, and no position is in that condition. Simplicity, fit with physics, ontological economy, and the fruitfulness of causal assumptions remain real reasons, untouched here. What is no longer available is the claim to hold no primitive at all — and with it the ranking of the two by which of them is grounded, since the evidence that establishes causal claims is silent on where the seam goes.