Ceteris Paribus Laws

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 (...) Humean-inspired approach that draws heavily on concepts from the information and computing sciences. Specifically, Wheeler argues that laws are best seen as algorithms for compressing empirical data and that ideal laws are needed as 'lossy compressors' for complex data. Major figures in the metaphysics of science receive special attention such as Ronald Giere, Bas van Fraassen, Nancy Cartwright, David Lewis and Marc Lange. This book is essential reading for philosophers of science and will interest metaphysicians, epistemologists and others interested in applying concepts from computing to traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

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 (...) claims that Maxwell himself did not believe in a luminiferous aether are also indefensible. This paper corrects the record. In order to trace Fresnel's Laws across significant ontological changes, they must be followed past Einstein into modern physics and nonlinear optics. I develop the philosophical implications of a more accurate history, and analyze Fresnel's Laws' historical trajectory in terms of dynamic ceteris paribus clauses. Structuralists have not embraced ceteris paribus laws, but they continue to point to Fresnel's Laws to resist anti-realist arguments from theory change. Fresnel's Laws fit the standard definition of a ceteris paribus law as a law applicable only in particular circumstances. Realists who appeal to the historical continuity of Fresnel's Laws to combat anti-realists must incorporate ceteris paribus laws into their metaphysics. (shrink)

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 (...) sense of them are alike. Once these generalizations are properly understood as generics, the recent cognitive approach to generics can be extended to the study of the relevant sciences. The last section indicates ways in which this extension is fruitful for the two strands of research that we combine: the philosophy of science literature on generalizations and the semantics literature on generics. (shrink)

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 (...) are not in any obvious sense about regularities in behaviour. A Humean approach to physical laws with exceptions is possible, however, if we adopt a view of laws that takes them to be the algorithms in the algorithmic compressions of empirical data. When this is supplemented with a distinction between lossy and lossless compression, we can explain exceptions in terms of compression artefacts present in the application of the lossy laws. (shrink)

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.

Gerhard Schurz [2001, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 32, 65-107] has proposed to reconstruct auxiliary hypothesis addition, e.g., postulation of Neptune to immunize Newtonian mechanics, with concepts from non-monotonous inference to avoid the retention of false predictions that are among the consequence-set of the deductive model. However, the non-monotonous reconstruction retains the observational premise that is indeed rejected in the deductive model. Hence, his proposal fails to do justice to Lakatos' core-belt model, therefore fails to meet what Schurz coined (...) "Lakatos' challenge". It is argued that Lakatos's distinction between core and belt of a research program is not mapable onto premise-set and consequence-set and that Schurz's understanding of a ceteris paribus clause as a transfinite list of interfering factors is problematic. I propose a simple reading of Lakatos's use of the term ceteris paribus clause and motivate why the term hypothesis addition, despite not being interpretable literally, came to be entrenched. (shrink)

Our understanding of subjunctive conditionals has been greatly enhanced through the use of possible world semantics and, more precisely, by the idea that they involve variably strict quantification over possible worlds. I propose to extend this treatment to ceteris paribus conditionals – that is, conditionals that incorporate a ceteris paribus or ‘other things being equal’ clause. Although such conditionals are commonly invoked in scientific theorising, they traditionally arouse suspicion and apprehensiveness amongst philosophers. By treating ceteris paribus conditionals as a species (...) of variably strict conditional I hope to shed new light upon their content and their logic. (shrink)

Many have claimed that ceteris paribus 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)

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 (...) claims that Maxwell himself did not believe in a luminiferous aether are also indefensible. This paper corrects the record. In order to trace Fresnel's Laws across significant ontological changes, they must be followed past Einstein into modern physics and nonlinear optics. I develop the philosophical implications of a more accurate history, and analyze Fresnel's Laws' historical trajectory in terms of dynamic ceteris paribus clauses. Structuralists have not embraced ceteris paribus laws, but they continue to point to Fresnel's Laws to resist anti-realist arguments from theory change. Fresnel's Laws fit the standard definition of a ceteris paribus law as a law applicable only in particular circumstances. Realists who appeal to the historical continuity of Fresnel's Laws to combat anti-realists must incorporate ceteris paribus laws into their metaphysics. (shrink)

Ceteris-paribus clauses are nothing to worry about; a ceteris-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. 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 has been suggested that a functionalist understanding of the metaphysics of psychological typing eliminates the prospect for psychological laws. Kim, Millikan, and Shapiro have each separately argued that, if psychological types as functional types are multiply realized, then the diversity of realizing mechanisms demonstrates that there can be no laws of psychology. Additionally, Millikan has argued that the role of functional attribution in the explanation of historical kinds limits the formulation of psychological principles to particular taxa; hence, psychological laws (...) applicable to any cognitive being are not possible. Both arguments against the possibility of psychological laws, I want to suggest, only succeed at showing that certain types of empirical principles will not be laws. I will suggest that a further type of empirical principle, grounded in the general constraints on the sustainability of population types, remains in the running as a candidate law. Importantly, the formulation of these principles presupposes a functionalist understanding of psychological typing. (shrink)

The use of ceteris paribus clauses in philosophy and in the sciences has a long and fascinating history. Persky (1990) traces the use by economists of ceteris paribus clauses in qualifying generalizations as far back as William Petty’s Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (1662). John Cairnes’ The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (1857) is credited with enunciating the idea that the conclusions of economic investigations hold “only in the absence of disturbing causes”.1 His Leading Principles (1874) contains the (...) classic example of a ceteris paribus law: “The rate of wage, other things being equal, varies inversely with the supply of labour”. Carines’ ideas were popularized by Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics (1890) where he argued for a methodology that involved holding disturbing causes “in a pound called Caeteris Paribus”. It is unclear when the notion of ceteris paribus laws made its appearance in the philosophical literature; but in the nineteenth century it is to be found in Mill’s System of Logic (1843), and in the twentieth century it gained prominence in the Hempel-inspired debates of the 1950’s over the role of general laws in historical explanations, albeit under other labels such as quasi-laws (Rescher) or grounded generalizations (Scriven). (shrink)

This essay defends the role of law-like explanation in the social sciences by showing that the "argument from complexity" fails to demonstrate a difference in kind between the subject matter of natural and social science. There are problems internal to the argument itself - stemming from reliance on an overly idealized view of natural scientific practice - and reason to think that, based upon an analogy with a more sophisticated understanding of natural science, which makes use of "redescriptions" in the (...) face of obstacles like complexity, we have reason to be optimistic about the prospects for a nomological social science. (shrink)

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 (...) Earth’s habitability, leads often to the conclusion that such state-of-affairs must be rare in the Galaxy. I argue that this reasoning is deeply flawed, for several closely related reasons. In addition, the relevance of the philosophical problem of transworld identity for this kind of historical reasoning in science is put forward. This highlights many explanatory problems one faces when using historical counterfactuals in study of complex, nonlinear dynamical systems – and bolsters the relevance of philosophy for evaluation of scientific explanatory claims. (shrink)

The problem of ceteris paribus clauses and Hempel’s problem of provisos are closely-related difficulties. Both challenge advocates of accounts of scientific theories involving laws understood as universal generalizations, and they have been treated as identical problems. Earman and Roberts argue that the problems are distinct. Towards arguing against them, I characterize the relationship between Hempel’s provisos and one way of expressing ceteris paribus clauses. I then describe the relationship between the problems attributed to the clauses, suggesting that they form a (...) single problem-cluster. However, Hempel’s way of formulating provisos and discussing what they involve entangles provisos with the problem of skepticism. This creates a departure in Hempel’s discussion of provisos from the distinctive problem of vacuity which characterizes the problem of ceteris paribus clauses, though for different reasons than Earman and Roberts suggest. (shrink)

I defend the prospect of good science in the social sciences by looking at the obstacles to social laws. I criticize traditional approaches, which rule for or against social laws on primarily conceptual grounds, and argue that only a close analysis of actual empirical research can decide the issue. To that end, I focus on problems caused by the ceteris paribus nature of social generalizations, outline a variety of ways those problems might be handled, and then examine in detail the (...) work of Paige on agrarian revolutions. Paige's work, I argue, handles its problems roughly as well as does some of the best work in evolutionary biology. The upshot is that some social laws can be relatively well confirmed. (shrink)

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 (...) worlds which do not satisfy the requirements of the clause, thus excluding miracles. If no world can satisfy the ceteris paribus clause in its entirety, then prioritisation is triggered to select worlds that maximise agreement on those things which are favoured most. (shrink)

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.

This paper concerns the relationship between dispositions and ceteris paribus laws. 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 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 is easy (...) to demonstrate at the macro-Ievel. 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)

It is often claimed that the bulk of the laws of physics -- including such venerable laws as Universal Gravitation -- are violated in many circumstances because they have counter-instances that result when a system is not isolated from other systems. Various accounts of how one should interpret these violated laws have been provided. In this paper, I examine two accounts of violated laws, that they are merely ceteris paribus laws and that they are manifestations of capacities. Through an examination (...) of the primary example that motivated these views, I show that given a proper understanding of the situation, neither view is optimal because the law is not even apparently violated. Along the way, I am able to diagnose what has led to the mistaken belief: I show that it originates from an element of the standard empiricist conception of laws. I then evaluate the suggestions of how to interpret violated laws with respect to other examples and find them wanting there too. (shrink)

Standard objections to the notion of a hedged, or ceteris paribus, law of nature usually boil down to the claim that such laws would be either 1) irredeemably vague, 2) untestable, 3) vacuous, 4) false, or a combination thereof. Using epidemiological studies in nutrition science as an example, I show that this is not true of the hedged law-like generalizations derived from data models used to interpret large and varied sets of empirical observations. Although it may be ‘in principle impossible’ (...) to construct models that explicitly identify all potential causal interferers with the relevant generalization, the view that our failure to do so is fatal to the very notion of a cp-law is plausible only if one illicitly infers metaphysical impossibility from epistemic impossibility. I close with the suggestion that a model-theoretic approach to cp-laws poses a problem for recent attempts to formulate a Mill-Ramsey-Lewis theory of cp-laws. (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 Kripke, further elaborated in Kusch :156–163, 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)

The discovery of high-level causal relations seems a central activity of the special sciences. Those same sciences are less successful in formulating strict laws. If causation must be underwritten by strict laws, we are faced with a puzzle, which might be dubbed the 'no strict laws' problem for high-level causation. Attempts have been made to dissolve this problem by showing that leading theories of causation do not in fact require that causation be underwritten by strict laws. But this conclusion has (...) been too hastily drawn. Philosophers have tended to equate non-strict laws with ceteris paribus laws. I argue that there is another category of non-strict law that has often not been properly distinguished: namely, minutiae rectus laws. If, as it appears, many special science laws are minutiae rectus laws, then this poses a problem for their ability to underwrite causal relations in a way that their typically ceteris paribus nature does not. I argue that the best prospect for resolving the resurgent 'no strict laws' problem is to argue that special science laws are in fact typically probabilistic, rather than being minutiae rectus laws. (shrink)

It is often supposed that the spectacular successes of our modern mathematical sciences support a lofty vision of a world completely ordered by one single elegant theory. In this book Nancy Cartwright argues to the contrary. When we draw our image of the world from the way modern science works - as empiricism teaches us we should - we end up with a world where some features are precisely ordered, others are given to rough regularity and still others behave in (...) their own diverse ways. This patchwork makes sense when we realise that laws are very special productions of nature, requiring very special arrangements for their generation. Combining classic and newly written essays on physics and economics, The Dappled World carries important philosophical consequences and offers serious lessons for both the natural and the social sciences. (shrink)

One of the points of principle made by Cartwright is that the fundamental laws do not describe reality because they are always employed together with ceteris paribus clauses, the implication being that ceteris paribus assumptions always have dire consequences. We here wish to offer a dynamical interpretation of ceteris paribus laws in terms of their stability or fragility. On this interpretation, the consequences of ceteris paribus assumptions become concretely dependent on the nature of the laws under consideration and cannot be (...) decided in a blanket fashion a priori. Using insights from nonlinear dynamical systems theory, we shall put forward the idea that any assumption of the general validity or invalidity of ceteris paribus laws amounts to a stability or fragility assumption, respectively. We shall then argue that it is in certain cases possible to relativise the consequences of ceteris paribus assumptions in a concrete way. We shall also indicate briefly how the same principle applies to Cartwright's arguments concerning composition of causes and approximations. Overall, our intention is to suggest a framework within which Cartwright's intuitions about the fundamental laws of physics could be grounded. (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 then Gx, ceteris paribus’ may state no more than a tautology: ‘For all x: Fx then 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 chapter 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)

A popular defence of the possibility of social laws is to interpret them as ceteris paribus statements along the same line as physical laws. It cannot be assumed, however, without further considerations regarding the role of initial conditions, that social laws may acquire the status of genuine laws. Two vexing problems need to be addressed: Exceptions should be compatible rather than incompatible with social regularities and social laws should not depend on initial conditions. The paper argues that neither of these (...) conditions is satisfied in the case of social laws. Although social laws present practical constraints, they do not constitute genuine structural constraints as physical laws do. (shrink)

We interpret ceteris paribus conditions as the conditions necessary to conducting an experiment. "Ceteris paribus" is thus not a hold-all for whatever we do not know, but a listing of the various decisions taken in moving from a theoretical hypothesis to a testable proposition. The decisions range from modeling in a certain way to selecting a particular functional form or estimation technique. They embody best knowledge/best practice. Debate about the meaning and importance of any test result must center on these (...) decisions; hence they should be laid bare. We give a detailed example from recent macroeconomics, Lucas' test of the natural rate hypothesis. (shrink)

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 (...) non-trivial truth conditions and that it is impossible for empirical evidence to disconfirm them. (shrink)

The SPP is, among other things, a place where we discuss nagging and perennial problems on the bordermarches between philosophy and the sciences. Sometimes problems are nagging and perennial because they are deep and difficult. And sometimes they are merely an artifact, a shadow cast by our own way of formulating the problem. I should like to suggest to you that philosophy of mind suffers badly from being the last refuge of the best philosophy of science of the 1950's, and (...) that some of its problems are in fact illusions that could be dispelled by consideration of more recent developments in the philosophy of science. In particular, philosophy of psychology has been plagued by a famous contrast between its "ceteris paribus" laws and the "exceptionless" laws of the physical sciences. This has led to doubts about the scientific status of psychology, the status of psychological kinds as natural kinds, and even their ontological legitimacy. I argue here that this problematic is a consequence of assuming a particular analysis of scientific laws as (exceptionless) universally quantifed claims. This analysis has largely been rejected in contemporary philosophy of science. And more recent analyses that take notice of the role of idealization in scientific modeling both dissolve the nagging problem and shed new light upon differences between the sciences. (shrink)

Since the seventeenth century, our understanding of the natural world has been one of phenomena that behave in accordance with natural laws. While other elements of the early modern scientific worldview may be rejected or at least held in question—the metaphor of the world as a great machine, the narrowly mechanist assumption that all physical interactions must be contact interactions, the idea that matter might actually be obeying rules laid down by its Divine Author – the notion of natural law (...) has continued to play a pivotal role in actual scientific practice, in our philosophical interpretations of science, and in their its metaphysical implications. (shrink)

Sentences of the form ‘Fs are Gs’ can express laws of nature, weaker Special Science laws, and also regularities which are not a part of any explicit science. These so-called generic sentences express nomic relationships which may have exceptions. I discuss the kinds of regularities expressed by generic sentences and argue that since they play a similar role in determining our ability to categorise and reason about the world, we should look for a unified treatment of them.

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 (...) as laws if they are explanatorily deep. The account of causal cp laws defended by the paper derives from a de-relativized variant of Woodward’s definition of direct type-level causation but can be shown not to conflict with Woodward’s thesis that there is no such thing as a cp law. (shrink)

The phrase of ceteris paribus , i.e., other things being equal, is widely employed to state laws in non-basic sciences, such as economics, medicine, geography, biology, and psychology. However, what the phrase in question says is highly unclear, which results in severe philosophical problems calling into question the status of special sciences. The main purpose of this paper is to critically examine a lexicographic study of cp proposed by Michael Morreau , who tries to provide an adequate semantic analysis of (...) cp-laws through this study. It is argued that, despite Morreau’s attempt to excavate meanings possibly contained in a cp-phrase, his proposal is very limited in the progress it makes. Toward the end of this paper, an alternative approach is sketched, in which the pragmatic role played by cp in the sciences is emphasized. (shrink)

The question of whether biology contains laws has important implications about the nature of science. Some philosophers believe that the legitimacy of the special sciences depends on whether they contain laws. In this dissertation, I defend the thesis that biology contains laws. In Chapter I, I discuss the importance of this problem and set the stage for my inquiry. In Chapter V, I summarize the results of Chapters II, III, and IV and I offer reasons why the position I advance (...) should be preferred over the alternatives. ;In Chapter II, I argue that the epistemic functions of a priori biological laws in biology are the same as those of empirical laws in physics. I establish this claim by showing that zero force laws and singleton force laws in these sciences function in the same way. I conclude that the requirement that laws must be empirical is idle in connection with how laws operate in science. ;In Chapter III, I argue that even if there are ceteris paribus sentences, it is unlikely that there are ceteris paribus laws. If there are genuine ceteris paribus laws, then 'ceteris paribus' should be a proper part of a law statement in which it occurs. I argue that if we interpret 'ceteris paribus' in this way, the containing sentence cannot be a law because it does not satisfy a minimal condition for laws---i.e., "ceteris paribus A 's are B's" and "ceteris paribus A's are not B's" should not both be true. ;In Chapter IV, I argue that the reasons offered for the non-existence of empirical biological laws don't establish the intended conclusion. I, then, argue that the kinds of law we should expect to find in biology are biophysical laws. I defend this claim by providing a priori and a posteriori arguments. The a priori argument states that the complexity of a system is no reason to think that there are no laws about that system. The a posteriori argument states that current research in evolutionary ecology indicates the existence of biophysical laws. (shrink)

We interpret ceteris paribus conditions as the conditions necessary to conducting an experiment. "Ceteris paribus" is thus not a hold-all for whatever we do not know, but a listing of the various decisions taken in moving from a theoretical hypothesis to a testable proposition. The decisions range from modeling in a certain way to selecting a particular functional form or estimation technique. They embody best knowledge/best practice. Debate about the meaning and importance of any test result must center on these (...) decisions; hence they should be laid bare. We give a detailed example from recent macroeconomics, Lucas' test of the natural rate hypothesis. (shrink)

"Metalinguists" depict the truth conditions of counterfactuals in terms of logical relationships between certain kinds of sentences. Possible-worlds theorists more candidly acknowledge unactualized possibilities, which metalinguists end up having to postulate anyway. However, similarity is not the right criterion for picking out the relevant antecedent-worlds. Rather, the relevant antecedent-worlds are those in which the appropriate ceteris paribus conditions obtain. ;True ceteris paribus conditions are importantly distinct from two other ways of qualifying natural laws: ideality and normality conditions. Ordinary counterfactuals involve (...) less "back-tracking" than some philosophers have claimed. Control and randomization give experiments certain advantages, but problems can afflict even well-designed experiments. Inference from experiments to larger populations should be seen as a one-step, rather than a two-step, process of induction. ;Disputes arose over ceteris paribus conditions for experiments on character displacement and null models for island biogeography. The first dispute reminds us that some ceteris paribus conditions are incompatible with others. The second controversy illustrates the consequences of holding certain "other" factors constant, when they should be allowed to vary. Methodological critiques are not as likely to unseat a ruling paradigm like competition theory as are alternative explanations. The methodological paradigms of Popperian falsificationism and standard statistical hypothesis testing are incompatible with each other. ;Another dispute arose over ceteris paribus conditions for mathematical models of the relationship between the diversity and stability of ecological communities. This demonstrates that mathematical models involve some choices about ceteris paribus conditions that actual experiments do not. Special problems arise because of the possibility that stability is adaptive at the community level. Different modes of visual representation may have led scientists to adopt different ceteris paribus assumptions in this case. ;One rule of thumb for deciding between competing definitions of scientific terms is: Regard with suspicion any definition that turns a seemingly important empirical matter into an a priori exercise. Some, but not all, definitions of ecological "stability" are suspect according to this rule. The faulty definitions may have resulted from an over-emphasis on population dynamics. Machine metaphors of nature may have induced a related problem of experimental design. (shrink)

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. (...) Finally, this static account is extended to a schematic dynamic model of how we may learn about those normal and exceptional conditions. (shrink)

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 (...) providing a necessary condition on the truth of the cp-law claim, recognising the nomological machine has great practical importance. Referring to the nomological machine makes explicit where the regularities are to be found, which is of central importance to the use of cp-laws for prediction and manipulation. Equally important, bringing the nomological machine to the fore brings into focus the make-up of the machine—its parts, their powers and their arrangements—and its context case-by-case. (shrink)

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 (...) give rise to different inferential patterns. I draw two further conclusions. The difference in logical behavior poses a severe problem for extant semantic theories of cp-laws, and: we cannot elucidate the distinction between kinds and non-kinds by suggesting that only kinds can appear in laws. (shrink)