A Semantics and Methodology for Ceteris Paribus Hypotheses

Clark Glymour a Semantics and Methodology for Ceteris Paribus Hypotheses

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

The Role of Kinds in the Semantics of Ceteris Paribus Laws

Ceteris Paribus Conditionals and Comparative Normalcy

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...

Ceteris Paribus, There Is No Problem of Provisos

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...

Conditional Preferences: A New Semantics for Database Queries

Preference queries aim to retrieve from large databases those objects that better match user’s requirements. Approaches proposed so far in the DB field for specifying preferences are limited when one needs to consider conditional, rather than absolute, preferences (e.g., I prefer driving by car in winter, and by motorbike in summer), which are common in context-aware applications. CP-nets are a...