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Among the currently available philosophical views on what the concept of law in science must exactly amount to, the so-called “Mill-Ramsey-Lewis view” or “Best System Approach” has attracted many minded philosophers over the years. Still, though attractive in many ways, such an approach is beset with a notorious issue: it cannot properly account for the putative autonomy of laws in the special sciences. In order to palliate this issue, the “Better Best System Account” of lawhood has been recently devised (Callender & Cohen 2010; Schrenk 2014), which makes use of emergence as a relation between quasi-autonomous sets of laws, constitutive of the freestanding special sciences. In particular, it has been contented that John Stuart Mill's early take on emergence and lawhood may be considered as the ultimate historical origin of the view (Schrenk 2017).
This paper aims at three interrelated objectives. The first, critical in nature, is to show that considering John Stuart Mill as the progenitor of [BBSA] as it is formulated is based on an erroneous interpretation of Mill's emergentism. A second objective, this time constructive, is to argue that the appropriate construal of Mill's emergence allows for considerably strengthening the case of the “Better Best System Account” as a way to safeguard the autonomy of the special sciences in a humean setting. Finally, an incidental benefit of the analysis will be to show that, contrary to the received wisdom, a broadly humean worldview may be hospitable to a non-trivial form of emergence.
