Other things being equal

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 96, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 147-162

  Morreau, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

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EID: 52549103457     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Nancy Cartwright provides such reasons in How the laws of physics lie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), though her view appears to be that laws are unhedged and therefore false. See also Carl Hempel, "Provisos: a problem concerning the inferential function of scientific theories", Erkenntnis 28 (1988), pp. 147-164
2. , and Geoffrey Joseph, "The many sciences and the one world", The Journal of Philosophy 77, 12 (1980), pp. 773-791.
3. Jerry Fodor, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, everything else being equal; hedged laws and psychological explanations" Mind 100 (1991), pp. 19-34;
4. Steven Schiffer, "Celeris paribus laws", Mind 100 (1991), pp. 1-17.
5. 'Rise' and 'fall' appear in mutually exclusive senses, neither term applying in case of a fluctuation. This is what makes these generalizations a contrary pair.
6. W.V.O. Quine, in Word and Object (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), claims that there is no way at all to paraphrase sentences with the modifier 'ceteris paribus' without fixing the contexts in which they are used: That the idioms involving it remain useful is due to those clues to the scope of "ceteris paribus" that are afforded by the context or other circumstances of the particular utterance. This is why the paraphrasing of such idioms into a satis- factorily explicit canonical notation is often practicable occasion by occasion and altogether hopeless idiom by idiom (p. 225). We shall see that Quine is both right and wrong about 'ceteris paribus'. The inter-pretation of this modifier is indeed sensitive to circumstances of the particular utterance, just as the interpretations of indexicals and other context-sensitive expressions are. But, as we shall see, ceteris paribus generalizations have canonical paraphrases anyway, involving other context-sensitive expressions.
7. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1983).
8. Geoffrey Joseph, op. cit., p. 777.
9. That ideal objects enter into the interpretation of certain generalizations might seem to render them vacuous, since as a matter of physical necessity these ideal objects do not exist. In section 5,1 shall consider paraphrases that do not introduce such fictions.
10. Elliot Sober, The nature of selection (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 27.
11. Ibid., p. 28, footnote 14.
12. Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on rules and private language: an elementary exposition (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
13. Ibid., p. 27.
14. Geoffrey Joseph, op. cit., p. 777.
15. From André Kukla, "The theory-observation distinction", The Philosophical Review 105, 2(1996), p. 201.
16. Quine, op. cit., p. 249.
17. Paul Pietroski and Georges Rey, "When other things aren't equal: saving ceteris paribus laws from vacuity", The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 46 (1995), pp. 81-110. By "vacuous" generalizations they appear tomean those that are trivially true, not those that are elliptical or fail in some other way to express propositions.
18. Which is not to say that this belief could not be adopted by someone with beliefs different from ours. Believability, in the sense I intend here, is a subjective notion; whether one can reasonably adopt a new belief depends on the beliefs he already has.
19. Though it is, of course, a reasonable way for Buridan's ass to settle on a pile of hay. Choices between piles of hay are unlike choices between beliefs in several ways that can account for the reasonableness of random choice in the one case but not in the other. The ass ought to choose one or the other pile. But there is no need for us to adopt one or the other belief. Also, unlike piles of hay, beliefs have contents, and these contents can to a greater or lesser extent be justified.
20. Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, "Studies in the logic of explanation", Philosophy of Science 15 (1948), pp. 135-175.
21. Carl Hempel, op. cit.
22. Ronald Laymon discusses a further difficulty that hedged laws bring for the covering-law model. See his "Idealizations and the testing of theories by experimentation', in Peter Achinstein and Owen Hannaway (eds.) Observation, experiment, and hypothesis in modern physical science (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
23. Michael Morreau, "Fainthearted conditionals", The Journal of Philosophy 94, 4 (1997), pp. 187-211.
24. Satisfaction of this requirement does not entail that 'ceteris paribus' also expresses a provision when it appears in a generalization. Indeed, such a further requirement would not be realistic. The ceteris paribus generalization relating supply and price, for example, does not express that, conditional on some single proposition p, every increase in the supply of every product will cause an increase in price.
25. This assumption is implicit in the use of a "proviso function" to interpret conditionals with this modifier. This function determines the provision expressed by 'ceteris paribus', when a particular sentence with this modifier is interpreted in any given context. See Morreau, op. cit., pp. 198-199.
26. This assumption is implicit in the use of a "proviso function" to interpret conditionals with this modifier. This function determines the provision expressed by 'ceteris paribus', when a particular sentence with this modifier is interpreted in any given context. See Morreau, op. cit., pp. 198-199.