Ceteris Paribus Laws

Edited by Markus Schrenk (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Assistant editor: Daian Bica (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
About this topic
Summary An alleged law of nature—like Newton's law of gravitation—is said to be a ceteris paribus law if it does not hold under certain circumstances but only ‘when other things are equal’. Typical examples are: ‘provided the supply remains constant, the price of a product increases with growing demand, ceteris paribus’, ‘all bodies fall with the same speed, ceteris paribus’, ‘haemoglobin binds O2, ceteris paribus’. There is, however, an inherent tension in the notion of a ceteris paribus law: on the one hand, laws are said to be strict universal regularities, on the other hand, the proviso clause seems to allow for certain exceptions. Moreover, in the current debate on ceteris paribus laws fervent opponents to the whole idea of law statements with proviso clauses point out that no good sense can be made of a statement like ‘All Fs are Gs, ceteris paribus’. Such a phrase, so they say, is either tautologous like ‘All Fs are Gs, unless not’ or it stands for a proposition like ‘All Fs which are also… are Gs’ the gap of which we are unable to close. Many of those who argue in favour of the idea of ceteris paribus laws, however, not only claim that a proper analysis of what the proviso clause is supposed to mean can be given but even that all laws are of ceteris paribus character.
Key works There's a special Erkenntnis Volume on Ceteris paribus Laws which set the agenda for many years: Earman et al 2002 A follow-up volume is currently under review. Watch this space!
Introductions Reutlinger et al 2019
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Contents
199 found
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  1. What is Wrong with Ceteris-Paribus Law-Statements?Danny Frederick - manuscript
    It is often contended that the special sciences, and even fundamental physics, make use of ceteris-paribus law-statements. Yet there are general concerns that such law-statements are vacuous or untestable or unscientific. I consider two main kinds of ceteris-paribus law-statement. I argue that neither kind is vacuous, that one of the kinds is untestable, that both kinds may count as scientific to the extent that they form parts of conjunctions that imply novel falsifiable statements which survive testing, but that one kind (...)
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  2. Justification, Normalcy and Evidential Probability.Martin Smith - manuscript
    NOTE: This paper is a reworking of some aspects of an earlier paper – ‘What else justification could be’ and also an early draft of chapter 2 of Between Probability and Certainty. I'm leaving it online as it has a couple of citations and there is some material here which didn't make it into the book (and which I may yet try to develop elsewhere). My concern in this paper is with a certain, pervasive picture of epistemic justification. On this (...)
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  3. Weak Emergence-Based Non-Reductive Physicalism.Zhaohui Wen - 2023 - Dissertation, Ba, Wuhan University
    Author's note: I worked out a project for journal publication on the basis of this piece. Please regard this version as a historical document. For citation, please refer to the more updated version.
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  4. Hempel’s Raven Revisited.Andrew Bollhagen - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (3):113-137.
    The paper takes a novel approach to a classic problem—Hempel’s Raven Paradox. A standard approach to it supposes the solution to consist in bringing our inductive logic into “reflective equilibrium” with our intuitive judgements about which inductive inferences we should license. This approach leaves the intuitions as a kind of black box and takes it on faith that, whatever the structure of the intuitions inside that box might be, it is one for which we can construct an isomorphic formal edifice, (...)
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  5. A Minimal Metaphysics for Scientific Practice.Andreas Hüttemann - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    What are the metaphysical commitments which best 'make sense' of our scientific practice? In this book, Andreas Hüttemann provides a minimal metaphysics for scientific practice, i.e. a metaphysics that refrains from postulating any structure that is explanatorily irrelevant. Hüttemann closely analyses paradigmatic aspects of scientific practice, such as prediction, explanation and manipulation, to consider the questions whether and what metaphysical presuppositions best account for these practices. He looks at the role which scientific generalisation play in predicting, testing, and explaining the (...)
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  6. All Else Being Equal? Über Extension und Intension von Ceteris-Paribus- Gesetzen nach Lipton.Christian Hugo Hoffmann - 2020 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 34 (2):103-126.
    Naturgesetze spielen eine zentrale Rolle in der Wissenschaftstheorie. Traditionell fokussierten Wissenschaftstheoretiker auf (Fundamental-)Gesetze der Physik, die man als zumindest wahre, universell gültige und kontrafaktische Konditionale stützende Aussagen ansah. Wiewohl diese Behauptung über Gesetze für den Bereich der Physik wohl zutreffen mag, scheinen doch die Gesetze in den Spezialwissenschaften andere Charakteristika aufzuweisen. Von ihnen wird behauptet, sie hätten Ausnahmen, seien also Ceteris-Paribus-Gesetze. Den Ausführungen von Peter Lipton in seinem Artikel „All Else Being Equal“ folgend wird eine zweiteilige Forschungsfrage erörtert: Existieren genuine (...)
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  7. Laws, Exceptions and Dispositions.Max Kistler - 2020 - JOLMA 1 (1):53-74.
    Can laws of nature be universal regularities and nevertheless have exceptions? Several answers to this question, in particular the thesis that there are no laws outside of fundamental physics, are examined and rejected. It is suggested that one can account for exceptions by conceiving of laws as strictly universal determination relations between (instances of) properties. When a natural property is instantiated, laws of nature give rise to other, typically dispositional properties. In exceptional situations, such properties manifest themselves either in an (...)
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  8. Levelling counterfactual scepticism.Katie Steele & Alexander Sandgren - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):927-947.
    In this paper, we develop a novel response to counterfactual scepticism, the thesis that most ordinary counterfactual claims are false. In the process we aim to shed light on the relationship between debates in the philosophy of science and debates concerning the semantics and pragmatics of counterfactuals. We argue that science is concerned with many domains of inquiry, each with its own characteristic entities and regularities; moreover, statements of scientific law often include an implicit ceteris paribus clause that restricts the (...)
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  9. Generic Generalizations in Science: A Bridge to Everyday Language.François Claveau & Jordan Girard - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (4):839-859.
    This article maintains that an important class of scientific generalizations should be reinterpreted: they have typically been understood as ceteris paribus laws, but are, in fact, generics. Four arguments are presented to support this thesis. One argument is that the interpretation in terms of ceteris paribus laws is a historical accident. The other three arguments draw on similarities between these generalizations and archetypal generics: they come with similar inferential commitments, they share a syntactic form, and the existing theories to make (...)
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  10. Mentaculus Laws and Metaphysics.Heather Demarest - 2019 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 23 (3):387--399.
    The laws of nature are central to our understanding of the world. And while there is often broad agreement about the technical formulations of the laws, there can be sharp disagreement about the metaphysical nature of the laws. For instance, the Newtonian laws of nature can be stated and analyzed by appealing to a set of possible worlds. Yet, some philosophers argue the worlds are mere notational devices, while others take them to be robust, concrete entities in their own right. (...)
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  11. Ceteris Paribus Laws.Alexander Reutlinger, Gerhard Schurz, Andreas Hüttemann & Siegfried Jaag - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) (...)
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  12. Is it time for a Nietzschean genealogy of laws of nature?: Walter Ott, Lydia Patton : Laws of nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, x+264pp, $65 HB. [REVIEW]Jason Winning - 2019 - Metascience 28 (2):269-271.
  13. Mechanisms, Ceteris Paribus Laws and Covering-Law Explanation.Nancy Cartwright, John Pemberton & Sarah Wieten - 2018 - Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, Lse.
  14. Prioritised ceteris paribus logic for counterfactual reasoning.Patrick Girard & Marcus A. Triplett - 2018 - Synthese 195 (4):1681-1703.
    The semantics for counterfactuals due to David Lewis has been challenged by appealing to miracles. Miracles may skew a given similarity order in favour of those possible worlds which exhibit them. Lewis responded with a system of priorities that mitigates the significance of miracles when constructing similarity relations. We propose a prioritised ceteris paribus analysis of counterfactuals inspired by Lewis’ system of priorities. By analysing the couterfactuals with a ceteris paribus clause one forces out, in a natural manner, those possible (...)
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  15. What’s the Point of Ceteris Paribus? or, How to Understand Supply and Demand Curves.Jennifer S. Jhun - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (2):271-292.
    Philosophers sometimes claim that economics, and the idealizing strategies it employs, is ultimately unable to provide genuine laws of nature. Therefore, unlike physics, it does not qualify as an actual science. Careful consideration of thermodynamics, a well-developed physical theory, reveals substantial parallels with economic methodology. The corrective account of scientific understanding I offer appreciates these parallels: understanding in terms of efficient performance.
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  16. Idealization and the Laws of Nature.Billy Wheeler - 2018 - Switzerland: Springer.
    This new study provides a refreshing look at the issue of exceptions and shows that much of the problem stems from a failure to recognize at least two kinds of exception-ridden law: ceteris paribus laws and ideal laws. Billy Wheeler offers the first book-length discussion of ideal laws. The key difference between these two kinds of laws concerns the nature of the conditions that need to be satisfied and their epistemological role in the law’s formulation and discovery. He presents a (...)
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  17. A Dual-Role Account of Ceteris Paribus Laws.Kai-Yuan Cheng - 2017 - In Hsiang-Ke Chao & Julian Reiss (eds.), Philosophy of Science in Practice: Nancy Cartwright and the Nature of Scientific Reasoning. Springer Verlag.
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  18. Manipulationism, Ceteris Paribus Laws, and the Bugbear of Background Knowledge.Robert Kowalenko - 2017 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 31 (3):261-283.
    According to manipulationist accounts of causal explanation, to explain an event is to show how it could be changed by intervening on its cause. The relevant change must be a ‘serious possibility’ claims Woodward 2003, distinct from mere logical or physical possibility—approximating something I call ‘scientific possibility’. This idea creates significant difficulties: background knowledge is necessary for judgments of possibility. Yet the primary vehicles of explanation in manipulationism are ‘invariant’ generalisations, and these are not well adapted to encoding such knowledge, (...)
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  19. Humeanism and Exceptions in the Fundamental Laws of Physics.Billy Wheeler - 2017 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 21 (3):317-337.
    It has been argued that the fundamental laws of physics do not face a ‘problem of provisos’ equivalent to that found in other scientific disciplines (Earman, Roberts and Smith 2002) and there is only the appearance of exceptions to physical laws if they are confused with differential equations of evolution type (Smith 2002). In this paper I argue that even if this is true, fundamental laws in physics still pose a major challenge to standard Humean approaches to lawhood, as they (...)
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  20. Fresnel's laws, ceteris paribus.Aaron Sidney Wright - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 64:38-52.
    This article is about structural realism, historical continuity, laws of nature, and \emph{ceteris paribus} clauses. Fresnel's Laws of optics support Structural Realism because they are a scientific structure that has survived theory change. However, the history of Fresnel's Laws which has been depicted in debates over realism since the 1980s is badly distorted. Specifically, claims that J.~C. Maxwell or his followers believed in an ontologically-subsistent electromagnetic field, and gave up the aether, before Einstein's \emph{annus mirabilis} in 1905 are indefensible. Related (...)
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  21. Ceteris Paribus Laws and Minutis Rectis Laws.Luke Fenton-Glynn - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2):274-305.
    Special science generalizations admit of exceptions. Among the class of non-exceptionless special science generalizations, I distinguish minutis rectis generalizations from the more familiar category of ceteris paribus generalizations. I argue that the challenges involved in showing that mr generalizations can play the law role are underappreciated, and quite different from those involved in showing that cp generalizations can do so. I outline a strategy for meeting the challenges posed by mr generalizations.
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  22. Ley verdadera, explicación y descripción en un argumento de Nancy Cartwright.Sergio Aramburu - 2015 - In Filosofía e historia de la ciencia en el cono sur. Córdoba: pp. 25-32.
    Este trabajo consiste en un análisis de la tesis expuesta en el artículo de 1980 “Do the laws of physics state the facts?” de Nancy Cartwright, según la cual las leyes fundamentales de la física no “describen los hechos” porque, respecto de ellas, verdad y explicatividad se excluyen mutuamente. El texto fue luego republicado como tercer ensayo de su libro How the Laws of Physics Lie (1981), del que Mauricio Suárez afirma que el “trade-off” entre verdad y explicación es su (...)
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  23. Ceteris paribus conditions and the interventionist account of causality.Tobias Henschen - 2015 - Synthese 192 (10):3297-3311.
    The paper uses a de-relativized variant of Woodward’s definition of direct type-level causation to develop an account of causal ceteris paribus laws. It argues that the relation between X and Y needs to satisfy three conditions in order to qualify as one of direct type-level causation, that satisfaction of these conditions guarantees the applicability of claims of direct type-level causation, that the context of applicability motivates referring to these conditions as cp conditions, and that claims of direct type-level causation qualify (...)
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  24. Evolutionary Contingency, Stability, and Biological Laws.Jani Raerinne - 2015 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (1):45-62.
    The contingency of biological regularities—and its implications for the existence of biological laws—has long puzzled biologists and philosophers. The best argument for the contingency of biological regularities is John Beatty’s evolutionary contingency thesis, which will be re-analyzed here. First, I argue that in Beatty’s thesis there are two versions of strong contingency used as arguments against biological laws that have gone unnoticed by his commentators. Second, Beatty’s two different versions of strong contingency are analyzed in terms of two different stabilities (...)
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  25. Better Best Systems – Too Good To Be True.Marius Backmann & Alexander Reutlinger - 2014 - Dialectica 68 (3):375-390.
    Craig Callender, Jonathan Cohen and Markus Schrenk have recently argued for an amended version of the best system account of laws – the better best system account (BBSA). This account of lawhood is supposed to account for laws in the special sciences, among other desiderata. Unlike David Lewis's original best system account of laws, the BBSA does not rely on a privileged class of natural predicates, in terms of which the best system is formulated. According to the BBSA, a contingently (...)
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  26. Ceteris Paribus Laws in Physics.Andreas Hüttemann - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1715-1728.
    Earman and Roberts claim that there is neither a persuasive account of the truth-conditions of ceteris paribus laws, nor of how such laws can be confirmed or disconfirmed. I will give an account of the truth conditions of ceteris paribus laws in physics in terms of dispositions. It will meet the objections standardly raised against such an account. Furthermore I will elucidate how ceteris paribus laws can be tested in physics. The essential point is that physics provides methodologies for dealing (...)
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  27. Ceteris Paribus Laws: A Naturalistic Account.Robert Kowalenko - 2014 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 28 (2):133-155.
    An otherwise lawlike generalisation hedged by a ceteris paribus (CP) clause qualifies as a law of nature, if the CP clause can be substituted with a set of conditions derived from the multivariate regression model used to interpret the empirical data in support of the gen- eralisation. Three studies in human biology that use regression analysis are surveyed, showing that standard objections to cashing out CP clauses in this way—based on alleged vagueness, vacuity, or lack of testability—do not apply. CP (...)
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  28. The Role of Kinds in the Semantics of Ceteris Paribus Laws.Bernhard Nickel - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1729-1744.
    This paper investigates the interaction between semantic theories for cp-laws (roughly, laws that hold “all things equal”) and metaphysical theories of kinds in the special sciences. Its central conclusion is that cp-laws concerning kinds behave differently from cp-laws concerning non-kinds: “ravens are black” which concerns the kind corvus corax, behaves differently from from “albino ravens are white” which concerns the non-kind grouping of albino ravens. I argue that this difference is in the first instance logical: the two sorts of cp-laws (...)
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  29. Ceteris Paribus Laws Need Machines to Generate Them.John Pemberton & Nancy Cartwright - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1745-1758.
    Most of the regularities that get represented as ‘laws’ in our sciences arise from, and are to be found regularly associated with, the successful operation of a nomological machine. Reference to the nomological machine must be included in the cp-clause of a cp-law if the entire cp-claim is to be true. We agree, for example, ‘ceteris paribus aspirins cure headaches’, but insist that they can only do so when swallowed by someone with the right physiological makeup and a headache. Besides (...)
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  30. Do Statistical Laws Solve the 'Problem of Provisos'?Alexander Reutlinger - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1759-1773.
    In their influential paper “Ceteris Paribus, There is No Problem of Provisos”, Earman and Roberts (Synthese 118:439–478, 1999) propose to interpret the non-strict generalizations of the special sciences as statistical generalizations about correlations. I call this view the “statistical account”. Earman and Roberts claim that statistical generalizations are not qualified by “non-lazy” ceteris paribus conditions. The statistical account is an attractive view, since it looks exactly like what everybody wants: it is a simple and intelligible theory of special science laws (...)
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  31. Thinking about Non-Universal Laws: Introduction to the Special Issue Ceteris Paribus Laws Revisited.Alexander Reutlinger & Matthias Unterhuber - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1703-1713.
    What are ceteris paribus laws? Which disciplines appeal to cp laws and which semantics, metaphysical underpinning, and epistemological dimensions do cp law statements have? Firstly, we give a short overview of the recent discussion on cp laws, which addresses these questions. Secondly, we suggest that given the rich and diverse literature on cp laws a broad conception of cp laws should be endorsed which takes into account the different ways in which laws can be non-universal . Finally, we provide an (...)
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  32. CP-Law Statements as Vague, Self-Referential, Self-Locating, Statistical, and Perfectly in Order.John T. Roberts - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1775-1786.
    I propose understanding CP-law statements as statements that assert the existence of vague statistical laws, not by fully specifying the contents of those laws, but by picking them out via a description that is both self-referential and self-locating. I argue that this proposal validates many common assumptions about CP-laws and correctly classifies many examples of putative CP-laws. It does this while avoiding the most serious worries that motivate some philosophers to be skeptical of CP-laws, namely the worry that they lack (...)
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  33. Better Best Systems and the Issue of CP-Laws.Markus Schrenk - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1787-1799.
    This paper combines two ideas: (1) That the Lewisian best system analysis of lawhood (BSA) can cope with laws that have exceptions (cf. Braddon-Mitchell in Noûs 35(2):260–277, 2001; Schrenk in The metaphysics of ceteris paribus laws. Ontos, Frankfurt, 2007). (2) That a BSA can be executed not only on the mosaic of perfectly natural properties but also on any set of special science properties (cf., inter alia, Schrenk 2007, Selected papers contributed to the sections of GAP.6, 6th international congress of (...)
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  34. Ceteris Paribus and Ceteris Rectis Laws: Content and Causal Role.Gerhard Schurz - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1801-1817.
    This paper has three goals. The first goal is to work out the difference between literal ceteris paribus laws in the sense of “all others being equal” and ceteris rectis “laws” in the sense of “all others being right”. While cp laws involve a universal quantification, cr generalizations involve an existential quantification over the values of the remainder variables Z. As a result, the two differ crucially in their confirmability and lawlikeness. The second goal is to provide a classification of (...)
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  35. The epistemic account of ceteris paribus conditions.Wolfgang Spohn - 2014 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 4 (3):385-408.
    The paper focuses on interpreting ceteris paribus conditions as normal conditions. After discussing six basic problems for the explication of normal conditions and seven interpretations that do not well solve those problems I turn to what I call the epistemic account. According to it the normal is, roughly, the not unexpected. This is developed into a rigorous constructive account of normal conditions, which makes essential use of ranking theory and in particular allows to explain the phenomenon of multiply exceptional conditions. (...)
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  36. High-Level Exceptions Explained.Michael Strevens - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1819-1832.
    Why are causal generalizations in the higher-level sciences “inexact”? That is, why do they have apparent exceptions? This paper offers one explanation: many causal generalizations cite as their antecedent—the \(F\) in \(Fs\,\, {\textit{are}}\,\, G\) —a property that is not causally relevant to the consequent, but which is rather “entangled” with a causally relevant property. Entanglement is a relation that may exist for many reasons, and that allows of exceptions. Causal generalizations that specify entangled but causally irrelevant antecedents therefore tolerate exceptions.
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  37. Do Ceteris Paribus Laws Exist? A Regularity-Based Best System Analysis.Matthias Unterhuber - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S10):1833-1847.
    This paper argues that ceteris paribus (cp) laws exist based on a Lewisian best system analysis of lawhood (BSA). Furthermore, it shows that a BSA faces a second trivialization problem besides the one identified by Lewis. The first point concerns an argument against cp laws by Earman and Roberts. The second point aims to help making some assumptions of the BSA explicit. To address the second trivialization problem, a restriction in terms of natural logical constants is proposed that allows one (...)
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  38. Counterfactuals and unphysical ceteris paribus: An explanatory fallacy.Milan Cirkovic - 2013 - Filozofija I Društvo 24 (4):143-160.
    I reconsider a type of counterfactual argument often used in historical sciences on a recent widely discussed example of the so-called “rare Earth” hypothesis in planetary sciences and astrobiology. The argument is based on the alleged “rarity” of some crucial ingredient for the planetary habitability, which is, in Earth’s case, provided by contingent evolutionary development. For instance, the claim that a contingent fact of history which has created planet Jupiter enables shielding of Earth from most dangerous impact catastrophes, thus increasing (...)
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  39. Dispositions and Interferences.Gabriele Contessa - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):401-419.
    The Simple Counterfactual Analysis (SCA) was once considered the most promising analysis of disposition ascriptions. According to SCA, disposition ascriptions are to be analyzed in terms of counterfactual conditionals. In the last few decades, however, SCA has become the target of a battery of counterexamples. In all counterexamples, something seems to be interfering with a certain object’s having or not having a certain disposition thus making the truth-values of the disposition ascription and of its associated counterfactual come apart. Intuitively, however, (...)
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  40. Paradoxes of Confirmation and the Ceteris Paribus Clause.Adam Grobler - 2013 - Filozofia Nauki 21 (3):37 - +.
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  41. There Are No Ceteris Paribus Laws Bengt Hansson.Bengt Hansson - 2013 - In Christer Svennerlind, Jan Almäng & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations. Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday. Ontos Verlag. pp. 5--231.
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  42. There Are No Ceteris Paribus Laws.Bengt Hansson - 2013 - In Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday. Ontos Verlag. pp. 231-239.
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  43. On the Distinction Between Law Schemata and Causal Laws.Jens Harbecke - 2013 - Acta Analytica 28 (4):423-434.
    The paper argues against the widely accepted assumption that the causal laws of (completed) physics, in contrast to those of the special sciences, are essentially strict. This claim played an important role already in debates about the anomalousness of the mental, and it currently experiences a renaissance in various discussions about mental causation, projectability of special science laws, and the nature of physical laws. By illustrating the distinction with some paradigmatic physical laws, the paper demonstrates that only law schemata are (...)
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  44. Against the Statistical Account of Special Science Laws.Andreas Hüttemann & Alexander Reutlinger - 2013 - In Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), Recent Progress in Philosophy of Science: Perspectives and Foundational Problems. The Third European Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings. Springer. pp. 181-192.
    John Earman and John T. Roberts advocate a challenging and radical claim regarding the semantics of laws in the special sciences: the statistical account. According to this account, a typical special science law “asserts a certain precisely defined statistical relation among well-defined variables” and this statistical relation does not require being hedged by ceteris paribus conditions. In this paper, we raise two objections against the attempt to cash out the content of special science generalizations in statistical terms.
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  45. Two Concepts of Law of Nature.Brendan Shea - 2013 - Prolegomena 12 (2):413-442.
    I argue that there are at least two concepts of law of nature worthy of philosophical interest: strong law and weak law. Strong laws are the laws investigated by fundamental physics, while weak laws feature prominently in the “special sciences” and in a variety of non-scientific contexts. In the first section, I clarify my methodology, which has to do with arguing about concepts. In the next section, I offer a detailed description of strong laws, which I claim satisfy four criteria: (...)
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  46. Always or Never: Two Approaches to Ceteris Paribus. [REVIEW]Toni Vogel Carey - 2012 - Erkenntnis 77 (3):317-333.
    The Scientific Revolution spawned not just one methodology, but two. We have emphasized Bacon's inductivism at the expense of Galileo's more abstract, sophisticated method of successive approximation, and so have failed to appreciate Galileo's contribution to the ceteris paribus problem in philosophy of science. My purpose here is to help redress this imbalance. I first briefly review the old unsolved problems, and then point out the Baconian basis of ceteris paribus, as this clause is conventionally understood, and its history from (...)
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  47. Laws of Nature Don't Have_ Ceteris Paribus Clauses, They _Are Ceteris Paribus Clauses.Travis Dumsday - 2012 - Ratio 26 (2):134-147.
    Laws of nature are properly (if controversially) conceived as abstract entities playing a governing role in the physical universe. Dispositionalists typically hold that laws of nature are not real, or at least are not fundamental, and that regularities in the physical universe are grounded in the causal powers of objects. By contrast, I argue that dispositionalism implies nomic realism: since at least some dispositions have ceteris paribus clauses incorporating uninstantiated universals, and these ceteris paribus clauses help to determine their dispositions' (...)
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  48. Ceteris-paribus-Gesetze in der Physik.Andreas Hüttemann - 2012 - In Michael Esfeld (ed.), Philosophie der Physik.
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  49. Explanation of physical phenomena by laws of nature.Peter Mittelstaedt - 2012 - Epistemologia 2:234-246.
    For an ‘explanation' of physical facts by laws of nature, we have to establish a relation between physical facts and laws of nature. It is an open question, whether the laws of nature govern the facts with necessity or whether the laws are related to the facts merely by supervenience. In addition, it is not quite clear, whether the known laws of physics describe only artificially simplified cases, e.g. isolated situations, or whether the laws of physics actually grasp real facts. (...)
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  50. On ceteris paribus laws in economics (and elsewhere): why do social sciences matter to each other?Menno Rol - 2012 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 5 (2):27.
    Stipulating universal propositions with a ceteris paribus clause is normal practice in science and especially in economics. Yet there are several problems associated with the use of ceteris paribus clauses in theorising and in policy matters. This paper first investigates three questions: how can ceteris paribus clauses be non-vacuous? How can ceteris paribus laws be true? And how can they help in formulating successful policy interventions in a diversity of contexts? It turns out that ceteris paribus clauses are not always (...)
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