A few comments on Hilbert's Hotel (since Charles Taliaferro has brought that up) and "actual infinities": If you want a standard presentation of the usual Hilbert's Hotel "paradox", which has nothing to do with money, then check out Wikipedia's good entry . The "paradox" just dramatizes the basic fact that an infinite set can be put in one-one correspondence with a proper subset of itself. There is nothing paradoxical about that: on the contrary, it is tantamount to a definition of what it is for a set to be (Dedekind) infinite. Can there be "actual infinities" in the sense of realizations of Dedekind infinite sets in the actual world? Well, money won't do, to be sure (but that's just a fact about money, not about the general impossibility of "actual infinities"). Suppose you think that there are space-time points, and that actual space-time is dense -- i.e. between any two points there is another one. Then the points in a space-time interval will be Dedekind infinite. [Proof: label the end...

Take a law-statement of the form "All A s are B s" (I'm not saying that every law-statement has to be of this form: but it will do no harm to concentrate on this type of case). Then we can ask a pair of related questions. First, what kind of fact(s) make this type of law-statement true ? For if the statement isn't even true, it certainly isn't a law. And we can ask, second, what makes the statement a law -statement . For not all true generalizations are laws: some are just accidentally true. Different philosophers offer different package answers to this pair of questions, and the issues here are very hotly contended. It would be difficult to say much about them here, and we'll have to shelve any extended discussion. But let's see if we can make just a few preliminary comments relevant to the question originally posed. First: note that sometimes when people talk about laws they mean law-statements; sometimes when people talk about laws they mean the facts that make the law...