Abstract

It has been lately proposed that laws of nature are causal powers. The conditions of identity of universals are the causal powers that those universals give to their instantiations. One of the main objections against this conception of laws of nature and universals is that it would lead to, either an infinite regress, or a vicious circularity. In effect, if the conditions of identity of a universal are the causal powers that the universal gives to its instantiations, then it seems that the conditions of identity of a universal depend on other universals, because a causal power is the power to produce the instantiation of some universal or other. In this work it is considered if this problem can be tackled by a relaxation of some of the formal characteristics of ontological dependence, but this strategy appears inconvenient. Another more promising alternative is to suppose that universals are ontologically dependent on the network of nomological relations to which they belong. Under certain formal assumptions about the graph-theoretical structure of the nomic network the identity of a universal can be grounded by its sole position in it. The conception here defended results a form of nomic holism.