Abstract
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 used legitimately. They are meant to fence off a theory from disturbing factors, but economists who do not specify the clause well enough tend to fence variables in rather than off. In such cases, it would be better to use theoretical abstraction, which is something very different from the use of ceteris paribus clauses. However, abstract theorising conceptually leads one away from the concrete detail of real world situations in which policies take place. Hence, a fourth question arises: how can policy interventions be properly designed on the basis of abstract laws? To answer this question, I defend interdisciplinarity in concept choice.
Highlights
Stipulating universal propositions with a ceteris paribus clause is normal practice in science and especially in economics
Scientific explanation comes with the use of ceteris paribus laws: lawlike generalisations hedged with clauses that specify under what conditions the generalisation can be expected to be applicable
Either the ceteris paribus clause is seen as merely specifying the set of conditions under which the lawlike claim is true; or the clause specifies mere normality conditions; or the ceteris paribus laws describe the capacity of a system to behave in a certain way without the certainty that it will do so
Summary
Why would anyone want to dismiss the use of ceteris paribus clauses if it is ubiquitous in scientific practice? Because theories that aim to explain the workings of the world must be subjected to test and any hypotheses furnished with caveats escape falsification. Pietrosky and Rey’s quest concern vacuity type 1 Their starting point is, like mine, that ceteris paribus laws can be respectable parts of scientific theories in general. My other additional presumptions are that for economics such laws are acceptable even though it has been thought dubious that economic theory seems to be swamped in them; and that the related problem of vacuity type 2 deserves treatment independently of the problem of vacuity type 1. The answer to both questions—how ceteris paribus laws can be non-vacuous and how they can be true—leads to the same conclusion
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