On probabilistic best-systems accounts, laws aren't propositions

According to the probabilistic best-systems account of laws (PBSA), the fundamental laws of nature are the axioms of the system that optimizes a balance of probabilistic fit to reality, informativeness, and brevity in a perfectly natural language.

But here is a tricky little thing. Probabilistic laws include statements about chances, such as that an event of a certain type E has a chance of 1/3. But on PBSA, chances are themselves defined by PBSA. What it means to say “E has a chance of 1/3” seems to be that the best system entails that E has a chance of 1/3. On its face, this is circular: chance is defined in terms of entailment of chance.

I think there may be a way out of this, but it is to make the fundamental laws be sentences that need not express propositions. Here’s the idea. The fundamental laws are sentences in an formal language (with terms having perfectly natural meanings) and an additional uninterpreted chance operator. There are a bunch of choice-points here: is the chance operator unary (unconditional) or binary (conditional)? is it a function? does it apply to formulas, sentences, event tokens, event types or propositions? For simplicity, I will suppose it’s unary function applying to event types, even though that’s likely not the best solution in the final analysis. We now say that the laws are the sentences provable from the axioms of our best system. These sentences include the uninterpreted chance(x) function. We then say stuff like this:

1. When a sentence that does not use the chance operator is provable from the axioms, that sentence contributes to informativeness, but when that sentence is in fact false, the fit of the whole system becomes  − ∞.

2. When a sentence of the form chance(E) = p is provable from the axioms, then the closeness of the frequency of event type E to p contributes to fit (unless the fit is  − ∞ because of the previous rule), and the statement as such contributes to informativeness.

I have no idea how fit is to be measured when instead of being able to prove things like chance(E) = p, we can prove less precise statements like chance(E) = chance(F) or chance(E) ≥ p. Perhaps we need clauses to cover cases like that, or maybe we can hope that we don’t need to deal with this.

An immediate problem with this approach is that the laws are no longer propositions. We can no longer say that the laws explain, because sentences in a language that is not fully interpreted do not explain. But we can form propositions from the sentences: instead of invoking a law s as itself an explanation, we can invoke as our explanation the second order fact that s is a law, i.e., that s is provable from the axioms of the best system.

This is counterintuitive. The explanation of the evolution of amoebae should not include meta-linguistic facts about a formal language!