Views of laws of nature can be divided into two camps according to their answer
to the question: are laws mere regularities? Humeans answer in the affirmative.
They are motivated by Lewis’ doctrine of Humean Supervenience: “all there is to
the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing
and then another” (Lewis “New Work for a Theory of Universals,” ix). There can
be no variation of any kind of fact without variation of these local matters—
henceforth, “the Mosaic.” Thus, on the Humean view, laws are determined by the
Mosaic. Prominent defenders of Humeanism about laws include Lewis and
Loewer. The anti-Humean camp disagrees. They argue that laws are not reducible
to the Mosaic. More than mere regularities, the laws play some role fitting the
metaphor of “governing.” Anti-Humean, governing laws can be described as
relations between universals (Armstrong What Is a Law of Nature, Dretske “Laws
of Nature”), the powers or dispositions of particular objects (Ellis and Lierse), or
irreducible to anything further (Maudlin).
