 For instance, if one agrees with John Stuart Mill that from the laws one should be able to deduce everything and one considers the thermodynamic part of that “everything”, then the special initial condition will be needed for such a deduction. The modern heir of this conception of lawhood, the one associated with Frank Ramsey and David Lewis (see Loewer 1996), sees laws as the axioms of the simplest, most powerful, consistent deductive system possible. It is likely that the specification of a special initial condition would emerge as an axiom in such a system, for such a constraint may well make the laws much more powerful than they otherwise would be.