Dispositions are related to conditionals. Typically a fragile glass will break if struck with force. But possession of the disposition does not entail the corresponding simple (subjunctive or counterfactual) conditional. The phenomena of finks and antidotes show that an object may possess the disposition without the conditional being true. Finks and antidotes may be thought of as exceptions to the straightforward relation between disposition and conditional. The existence of these phenomena are easy to demonstrate at the macro-level. But do they (...) exist at the fundamental level also? While fundamental finkish dispositions may be excluded fairly straightforwardly, the existence of fundamental antidotes is more open. Nonetheless I conclude that the phenomenon is likely to be less widespread than at the macro level and that fundamental antidotes may be eliminable. According to the dispositional essentialist, the laws of nature can be explained by taking natural properties to be essentially dispositional. This account can be extended to show that the existence of finks and antidotes explains ceteris paribus laws. Consequently the existence or otherwise of fundamental finks and antidotes sheds some light on the question of whether fundamental laws may also be ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

Opponents of ceteris paribus laws are apt to complain that the laws are vague and untestable. Indeed, claims to this effect are made by Earman, Roberts and Smith in this volume. I argue that these kinds of claims rely on too narrow a view about what kinds of concepts we can and do regularly use in successful sciences and on too optimistic a view about the extent of application of even our most successful non-ceteris paribus laws. When it comes to (...) testing, we test ceteris paribus laws in exactly the same way that we test laws without the ceteris paribus antecedent. But at least when the ceteris paribus antecedent is there we have an explicit acknowledgment of important procedures we must take in the design of the experiments — i.e., procedures to control for “all interferences” even those we cannot identify under the concepts of any known theory. (shrink)

In this paper the claim that laws of nature are to be understood as claims about what necessarily or reliably happens is disputed. Laws can characterize what happens in a reliable way, but they do not do this easily. We do not have laws for everything occurring in the world, but only for those situations where what happens in nature is represented by a model: models are blueprints for nomological machines, which in turn give rise to laws. An example from (...) economics shows, in particular, how we use--and how we need to use--models to get probabilistic laws. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relationship between dispositions and laws and the prospects for any analysis of talk of laws in terms of talk of dispositions. Recent attempts at such a reduction have often been motivated by the desire to give an account of ceteris paribus laws and in this they have had some success. However, such accounts differ as to whether they view dispositions as properties fundamentally of individuals or of kinds. I argue that if dispositions are properties of individuals, (...) we cannot give a complete account of ceteris paribus laws. Alternatively, if dispositions are properties of kinds, any reductive analysis of laws would require an extension of the notion of the dispositional beyond its usual meaning so that in effect there can be no reduction of laws to dispositions as traditionally understood. An attempt to reduce the nomological to the dispositional is therefore not the way to provide a unified account of traditional and ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

Given its importance in modern physics, philosophers of science have paid surprisingly little attention to the subject of symmetries and invariances, and they have largely neglected the subtopic of symmetry breaking. I illustrate how the topic of laws and symmetries brings into fruitful interaction technical issues in physics and mathematics with both methodological issues in philosophy of science, such as the status of laws of physics, and metaphysical issues, such as the nature of objectivity.

Much of the literature on ceteris paribus laws is based on a misguided egalitarianism about the sciences. For example, it is commonly held that the special sciences are riddled with ceteris paribus laws; from this many commentators conclude that if the special sciences are not to be accorded a second class status, it must be ceteris paribus all the way down to fundamental physics. We argue that the (purported) laws of fundamental physics are not hedged by ceteris paribus clauses and (...) provisos. Furthermore, we show that not only is there no persuasive analysis of the truth conditions for ceteris paribus laws, there is not even an acceptable account of how they are to be saved from triviality or how they are to be melded with standard scientific methodology. Our way out of this unsatisfactory situation to reject the widespread notion that the achievements and the scientific status of the special sciences must be understood in terms of ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

Many have claimed that ceteris paribus (CP) laws are a quite legitimate feature of scientific theories, some even going so far as to claim that laws of all scientific theories currently on offer are merely CP. We argue here that one of the common props of such a thesis, that there are numerous examples of CP laws in physics, is false. Moreover, besides the absence of genuine examples from physics, we suggest that otherwise unproblematic claims are rendered untestable by the (...) mere addition of the CP operator. Thus, “CP all Fs are Gs” when read as a straightforward statement of fact, cannot be the stuff of scientific theory. Rather, we suggest that when ``ceteris paribus'' appears in scientific works it plays a pragmatic role of pointing to more respectable claims. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999) argues that (1) the fundamental laws of physics are true when and only when appropriate ceteris paribus modifiers are attached and that (2) ceteris paribus modifiers describe conditions that are almost never satisfied. She concludes that when the fundamental laws of physics are true, they don't apply in the real world, but only in highly idealized counterfactual situations. In this paper, we argue that (1) and (2) together with an assumption about contraposition entail the opposite conclusion (...) — that the fundamental laws of physics do apply in the real world. Cartwright extracts from her thesis about the inapplicability of fundamental laws the conclusion that they cannot figure in covering-law explanations. We construct a different argument for a related conclusion — that forward-directed idealized dynamical laws cannot provide covering-law explanations that are causal. This argument is neutral on whether the assumption about contraposition is true. We then discuss Cartwright's simulacrum account of explanation, which seeks to describe how idealized laws can be explanatory. (shrink)

Debate over the nature of science has recently moved from the halls of academia into the public sphere, where it has taken shape as the "science wars." At issue is the question of whether scientific knowledge is objective and universal or socially mediated, whether scientific truths are independent of human values and beliefs. Ronald Giere is a philosopher of science who has been at the forefront of this debate from its inception, and Science without Laws offers a much-needed mediating perspective (...) on an increasingly volatile line of inquiry. Giere does not question the major findings of modern science: for example, that the universe is expanding or that inheritance is carried by DNA molecules with a double helical structure. But like many critics of modern science, he rejects the widespread notion of science--deriving ultimately from the Enlightenment--as a uniquely rational activity leading to the discovery of universal truths underlying all natural phenomena. In these highly readable essays, Giere argues that it is better to understand scientists as merely constructing more or less abstract models of limited aspects of the world. Such an understanding makes possible a resolution of the issues at stake in the science wars. The critics of science are seen to be correct in rejecting the Enlightenment idea of science, and its defenders are seen to be correct in insisting that science does produce genuine knowledge of the natural world. Giere is utterly persuasive in arguing that to criticize the Enlightenment ideal is not to criticize science itself, and that to defend science one need not defend the Enlightenment ideal. Science without Laws thus stakes out a middle ground in these debates by showing us how science can be better conceived in other ways. (shrink)

Taking seriously the arguments of Earman, Roberts and Smith that ceteris paribus laws have no semantics and cannot be tested, I suggest that ceteris paribus claims have a kind of formal pragmatics, and that at least some of them can be verified or refuted in the limit.

In this paper I defend fundamental physical laws from the arguments mounted by Nancy Cartwright in her (1999) book The Dappled World (and other publications). I argue, positively, that we have a good deal of evidence for mathematical laws—not just causal capacities—underlying many natural phenomena. I also argue, negatively, that Cartwright's main arguments unfairly demand that a fundamentalist be a strong reductionist.

Laws are supposed to tell us how physical systems actually behave. The analysis of an important part of physical practice--abstraction--shows, however, that laws describe the behavior of physical systems under very special circumstances, namely when they are isolated. Nevertheless, laws are applied in cases of non-isolation as well. This practice requires an explanation. It is argued that one has to assume that physical systems have dispositions. I take these to be innocuous from an empiricist's standpoint because they can--at least in (...) principle--be measured. Laws can be applied whenever such a disposition is present, they describe how the physical system would behave if the disposition were manifest. (shrink)

This article defends laws in the social sciences. Arguments against social laws are considered and rejected based on the "open" nature of social theory, the multiple realizability of social predicates, the macro and/or teleological nature of social laws, and the inadequacies of belief-desire psychology. The more serious problem that social laws are usually qualified ceteris paribus is then considered. How the natural sciences handle ceteris paribus laws is discussed and it is argued that such procedures are possible in the social (...) sciences. The article ends by arguing that at least some social research is roughly as well as confirmed as good work in evolutionary biology and ecology. (shrink)

The most recent challenge to the covering-law model of explanation (N. Cartwright, How the laws of Physics Lie) charges that the fundamental explanatory laws are not true. In fact explanation and truth are alleged to pull in different directions. We hold that this gets its force from confusing issues about the truth of the laws in the explanation and the precision with which those laws can yield an exact description of the event to be explained. In defending this we look (...) at Cartwright's major case studies and sketch an amended covering-law model of explanation. (shrink)

Semantic dispositionalism is the theory that a speaker’s meaning something by a given linguistic symbol is determined by her dispositions to use the symbol in a certain way. According to an objection by Saul Kripke, further elaborated in Kusch (2005), semantic dispositionalism involves ceteris paribus-clauses and idealisations, such as unbounded memory, that deviate from standard scientific methodology. I argue that Kusch misrepresents both ceteris paribus-laws and idealisation, neither of which factually approximate the behaviour of agents or the course of events, (...) but, rather, identify and isolate nature’s component parts and processes. An analysis of current results in cognitive psychology vindicates the idealisations involved and certain counterfactual assumptions in science generally. In particular, results suggest that there can be causal continuity between the dispositional structure of actual objects and that of highly idealised objects. I conclude by suggesting that we can assimilate ceteris paribus-laws with disposition ascriptions insofar as they involve identical idealising assumptions. (shrink)

Law-like generalisations hedged with a ceteris paribus-clause are incomplete strict laws. They can be “fleshed out” by adding a set of enabling, or completing, conditions to their antecedent. The nature of such completers must be subject to non-ad hoc constraints, however, failing which putative ceteris paribus-laws will be trivially true. The simplest and most plausible constraint is that relevant completers also occur in the antecedents of other laws. Apparent counterexamples to this proposal can be disarmed by interpreting the epistemology of (...) cp-laws as a curve-fitting problem, which yields the required distinction between spurious and genuine hedged regularities. It also suggests answers to common objections to cp-laws, in particular to the claims that they are vacuous, or that they cannot be fleshed out in the way suggested. (shrink)

Suppose that unobtanium-346 is a rare radioactive isotope. Consider: (1) Every Un346 atom, at its creation, decays within 7 microseconds (µs). (50%) Every Un346 atom, at its creation, has a 50% chance of decaying within 7µs. (1) and (50%) can be true together, but (1) and (50%) cannot together be laws of nature. Indeed, (50%)'s mere (non-vacuous) truth logically precludes (1)'s lawhood. A satisfactory analysis of chance and lawhood should nicely account for this relation. I shall argue first that David (...) Lewis's Humean picture accounts for this relation only by inserting this relation ‘by hand’. Next, I shall argue that this relation between law and chance also threatens a radically non-Humean picture of laws and chances. Finally, I shall offer an account of natural law that nicely explains the relation between chancy facts and deterministic laws. This explanation is not ad hoc because it derives the relation from the very same features of lawhood that account for the laws' special relation to counterfactuals and explain how the laws (unlike the accidents) possess a variety of necessity. The reason that a chancy fact such as (50%) keeps (1) from being a law, without keeping (1) from being true, is ultimately that a chancy fact constrains the subjunctive facts and (1)'s lawhood, unlike (1)'s truth, depends upon the subjunctive facts. (shrink)

Ceteris-paribus clauses are nothing to worry about; aceteris-paribus qualifier is not poisonously indeterminate in meaning. Ceteris-paribus laws teach us that a law need not be associated straightforwardly with a regularity in the manner demanded by regularity analyses of law and analyses of laws as relations among universals. This lesson enables us to understand the sense in which the laws of nature would have been no different under various counterfactual suppositions — a feature even of those laws that involve no ceteris-paribus (...) qualification and are actually associated with exceptionless regularities. Ceteris-paribus generalizations of an‘inexact science’ qualify as laws of that science in virtue of their distinctive relation to counterfactuals: they form a set that is stable for the purposes of that field. (Though an accident may possess tremendous resilience under counterfactual suppositions, the laws are sharply distinguished from the accidents in that the laws are collectively as resilient as they could logically possibly be.) The stability of an inexact science's laws may involve their remaining reliable even under certain counterfactual suppositions violating fundamental laws of physics. The ceteris-paribus laws of an inexact science may thus possess a kind of necessity lacking in the fundamental laws of physics. A nomological explanation supplied by an inexact science would then be irreducible to an explanation of the same phenomenon at the level of fundamental physics. Island biogeography is used to illustrate how a special science could be autonomous in this manner. (shrink)

It is often presumed that the laws of nature have special significance for scientific reasoning. But the laws' distinctive roles have proven notoriously difficult to identify--leading some philosophers to question if they hold such roles at all. This study offers original accounts of the roles that natural laws play in connection with counterfactual conditionals, inductive projections, and scientific explanations, and of what the laws must be in order for them to be capable of playing these roles. Particular attention is given (...) to laws of special sciences, levels of scientific explanation, natural kinds, ceteris-paribus clauses, and physically necessary non-laws. (shrink)

I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not "broader"--at least in the most straightforward sense.) The stability distinctive of the laws is used to explicate what it would mean for there (...) to be multiple grades (or degrees) of physical necessity. Whether there are is for science to discover. (shrink)

Hempel and Giere contend that the existence of provisos poses grave difficulties for any regularity account of physical law. However, Hempel and Giere rely upon a mistaken conception of the way in which statements acquire their content. By correcting this mistake, I remove the problem Hempel and Giere identify but reveal a different problem that provisos pose for a regularity account — indeed, for any account of physical law according to which the state of affairs described by a law-statement presupposes (...) a Humean regularity. These considerations suggest a normative analysis of law-statements. On this view, law-statements are not distinguished from accidental generalizations by the kind of Humean regularities they describe because a law-statement need not describe any Humean regularity. Rather, a law-statement says that in certain contexts, one ought to regard the assertion of a given type of claim, if made with justification, as a proper way to justify a claim of a certain other kind. (shrink)

Most laws are ceteris paribus (cp) laws: they say not that all Fs are G but only that All Fs are G all else being equal. Most philosophical accounts of laws, however, have focused on strict laws. This paper considers how some of the standard philosophical problems about laws change when we switch attention from strict to cp laws and what special problems these laws raise. It is argued that some cp laws do not simply reflect the complexity of the (...) world and the limitations of our minds. Correctly interpreted, they reveal the simplicity that underlies the complexity, a simplicity that it is without our cognitive powers to grasp. (shrink)

It has been claimed that ceteris paribus laws, rather than strict laws are the proper aim of the special sciences. This is so because the causal regularities found in these domains are exception-ridden, being contingent on the presence of the appropriate conditions and the absence of interfering factors. I argue that the ceteris paribus strategy obscures rather than illuminates the important similarities and differences between representations of causal regularities in the exact and inexact sciences. In particular, a detailed account of (...) the types and degrees of contingency found in the domain of biology permits a more adequate understanding of the relations among the sciences. (shrink)

Ceteris Paribus (cp-)laws may be said to hold only ``other things equal,'' signaling that their truth is compatible with a range of exceptions. Several theorists have taken this feature to introduce the presumption that cp-laws are trivial, one that needs to be countered if we are to appeal to cp-laws in the course of scientific investigation or our philosophical theorizing about it. I argue that the triviality worry is misplaced by pointing out that cp-laws are just a subset of uncontroversially (...) meaningful and contingent expressions of natural language, the generics. I then present an account of these generics that elucidates some of their most puzzling features, especially the ones that suggested the triviality worry in the first place. (shrink)

A common view is that ceteris paribus clauses render lawlike statements vacuous, unless such clauses can be explicitly reformulated as antecedents of ?real? laws that face no counterinstances. But such reformulations are rare; and they are not, we argue, to be expected in general. So we defend an alternative sufficient condition for the non-vacuity of ceteris paribus laws: roughly, any counterinstance of the law must be independently explicable, in a sense we make explicit. Ceteris paribus laws will carry a plethora (...) of explanatory commitments; and claims that such commitments are satisfied will be as (dis) confirmable as other empirical claims. (shrink)

This is the first part of a two-part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. The Humean base is easily to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characterization of the Humean base (...) that, we argue, enables HS to capture what is really stake in the debate, without taking on extraneous commitments. (shrink)

Philosophers like Duhem and Cartwright have argued that there is a tension between laws' abilities to explain and to represent. Abstract laws exemplify the first quality, phenomenological laws the second. This view has both metaphysical and methodological aspects: the world is too complex to be represented by simple theories; supplementing simple theories to make them represent reality blocks their confirmation. We argue that both aspects are incompatible with recent developments in nonlinear dynamics. Confirmation procedures and modelling strategies in nonlinear dynamics (...) show that there are simple, abstract theories that can be confirmed without encountering the problems pointed to by Cartwright. (shrink)

Laws of nature seem to take two forms. Fundamental physics discovers laws that hold without exception, ‘strict laws’, as they are sometimes called; even if some laws of fundamental physics are irreducibly probabilistic, the probabilistic relation is thought not to waver. In the nonfundamental, or special, sciences, matters differ. Laws of such sciences as psychology and economics hold only ceteris paribus – that is, when other things are equal. Sometimes events accord with these ceteris paribus laws (c.p. laws, hereafter), but (...) sometimes the laws are not manifest, as if they have somehow been placed in abeyance: the regular relation indicative of natural law can fail in circumstances where an analogous outcome would effectively refute the assertion of strict law. Many authors have questioned the supposed distinction between strict laws and c.p. laws. The brief against it comprises various considerations: from the complaint that c.p. clauses are void of meaning to the claim that, although understood well enough, they should appear in all lawstatements. These two concerns, among others, are addressed in due course, but first, I venture a positive proposal. I contend that there is an important contrast between strict laws and c.p. laws, one that rests on an independent distinction between combinatorial and noncombinatorial nomic principles.[ii] Instantiations of certain properties, e.g., mass and charge, nomically produce individual forces, or more generally, causal influences,[iii] in accordance with noncombinatorial laws. These laws are noncombinatorial in the sense that they govern the production of single causal influences. In the typical system, however, multiple causal influences operate in concert to determine the system’s behavior. This composing of forces accords with a further nomic principle, which I will call a ‘combinatorial law’. The earth exerts gravitational force on a baseball that has been thrown, yet that force alone does not determine the ball’s path; the gravitational force combines with other forces acting on the baseball, including other gravitational forces, resulting in the ball’s actual behavior.. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the space of possible particularistic approaches to Philosophy of Science by examining the differences and similarities between Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism—as expressed in both his earlier writings (e.g., Moral Reasons , 1993), and, more explicitly defended in his book Ethics without Principles (2004)—and Nancy Cartwright’s particularism in the philosophy of science, as defended in her early collection of essays, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), and her later book, The Dappled World: A Study of (...) the Boundaries of Science (1999). I shall argue that Dancy’s particularism is more radical, but also more plausible, than Cartwright’s, concluding that we have good reason to embrace a scientific particularism that is far closer to Dancy’s ethical particularism than any view defended by Nancy Cartwright, or any other philosopher from the ‘Stanford school’ of scientific theory. (shrink)

David Armstrong’s law-maker, nomological necessity (N), is a second order relational universal that holds between state of affairs types, e.g., N(F, G). With only a small proviso, nomological necessity is supposed to instantiate as the causation of its second relatum, G, whenever its first relatum, F, instantiates. In this paper, I will show that there is some friction within this theory when we consider that causal processes can be prevented and interfered with. The above mentioned proviso is supposed to handle (...) these case but, so I argue, it fails to do so. (shrink)

This paper concerns anti-Humean intuitions about connections in nature. It argues for the existence of a de re link that is not necessity. — Some anti-Humeans tacitly assume that metaphysical necessity can be used for all sorts of anti-Humean desires. Metaphysical necessity is thought to stick together whatever would be loose and separate in a Hume world, as if it were a kind of universal superglue. I argue that this is not feasible. Metaphysical necessity might connect synchronically co-existent properties—kinds and (...) their essential features, for example—but it is difficult to see how it could also serve as the binding force for successions of events. That is, metaphysical necessity seems not to be fit for diachronic, causal affairs in which causal laws, causation, or dispositions are involved. A different anti-Humean connection in nature has to do that job. My arguments focus mainly on a debate which has been the battleground for Humean vs. anti-Humean intuitions for many decades— namely, the analysis of dispositional predicates—but I believe (but do not argue here) that the arguments generalise to causation and causal laws straightforwardly. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science think that most laws of nature (even those of fundamental physics) are so called ceteris paribus laws, i.e., roughly speaking, laws with exceptions. Yet, the ceteris paribus clause of these laws is problematic. Amongst the more infamous difficulties is the danger that 'For all x: Fx ⊃ Gx, ceteris paribus' may state no more than a tautology: 'For all x: Fx ⊃ Gx, unless not'. One of the major attempts to avoid this problem (and others concerning (...) ceteris paribus laws) is to claim that the subject matter of laws are ascriptions of dispositions, powers, capacities etc., and not the regular behaviour we find in nature. That we do not know whether the cetera are paria in a specific situation does not matter to the dispositionalist because the objects have the disposition regardless of the circumstances. The defence of the latter claim is that dispositions can be instantiated without being manifested. Hence, the laws that ascribe dispositions are strict and it looks as if they do not face the above mentioned problems of ceteris paribus laws. In this essay I attempt to show that these assumptions are wrong. I hope to illustrate that not only does the ceteris paribus clause reoccur inside the dispositions, moreover, there are laws—laws about non-fundamental entities with instable dispositions—which bear a ceteris paribus clause that cannot be hidden in a disposition. (shrink)