Skip to main content
Log in

Who's Afraid of Ceteris-Paribus Laws? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Them

Erkenntnis Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

REFERENCES

  • Christie,.: 1994, ‘Philosophers versus Chemists Concerning “Laws of Nature”’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 25, 613–629.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Earman, J. and Roberts, J.: 1999, ‘Ceteris Paribus, There is no Problem of Provisos’ Synthese 118, 439–478.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hausman, D.: 1992, The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lange, M.: 1993, ‘Natural Laws and the Problem of Provisos’ Erkenntnis 38, 233–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lange, M.: 1999, ‘Laws, Counterfactuals, Stability, and Degrees of Lawhood’ Philosophy of Science 66, 243–267.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lange, M.: 2000, Natural Laws in Scientific Practice, Oxford University Press, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lange, M.: 2002, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics, Blackwell, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loeb, L.: 1934, The Kinetic Theory of Gases, McGraw Hill, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacArthur, R.: 1972, Geographic Ecology, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mill, J.S.: 1961, A System of Logic, Longmans Green, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Molnar, G.: 1967, ‘Defeasible Propositions’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 45, 185–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rescher, N.: 1970, Scientific Explanation, Free Press, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scriven, M.: 1959, ‘Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanations’ in P. Gardner (ed.), Theories of History, Free Press, New York, pp. 443–475.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Lange, M. Who's Afraid of Ceteris-Paribus Laws? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Them. Erkenntnis 57, 407–423 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021546731582

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021546731582

Keywords

Navigation