Erkenn DOI 10.

1007/s10670-012-9403-6 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Always or Never: Two Approaches to Ceteris Paribus

Toni Vogel Carey

Received: 28 July 2009 / Accepted: 5 September 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract The Scientic Revolution spawned not just one methodology, but two. We have emphasized Bacons inductivism at the expense of Galileos more abstract, sophisticated method of successive approximation, and so have failed to appreciate Galileos contribution to the ceteris paribus problem in philosophy of science. My purpose here is to help redress this imbalance. I rst briey review the old unsolved problems, and then point out the Baconian basis of ceteris paribus, as this clause is conventionally understood, and its history from Aristotle to twentieth century Positivism. Then I explore Galileos method of dealing with unwanted impediments, and the more general problem of accidents. I trace his methodology back to Archimedes and forward through the economic theories of Adam Smith (18th century), J. S. Mill (19th) and Milton Friedman (20th). Finally, I point out ways in which I think Galileos scientic method sheds light on, and provides a partial solution to, the ceteris paribus problem.

Much of what we say, in science and in life, carries the qualier other things being equal. The term ceteris paribus was in use by 1311, according to the OED. In economics it dates back to 1662 (Persky 1990, 188); and Newton makes liberal use of it in the Principia.1 So by now we should know what it means, and what, if anything, sanctions its use. Yet a 2002 issue of Erkenntnis devoted entirely to the ceteris paribus proviso reveals pervasive controversy about even such basic questions as whether it applies only in inexact (special) sciences like biology and psychology, or whether it goes all the way down to physics. One writer there

Newton (1995, 141, 197, 266 and passim).

T. V. Carey (&) 111 Orchard Court, Blue Bell, PA 19422-2834, USA e-mail: toni.carey@verizon.net

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(Woodward 2002, 304) simply dismisses the major analyses as on their own terms, complete failures. Why has the ceteris paribus proviso, particularly in scientic laws, proved so intractable? One reason may be that of two basic approaches to it, we have persistently emphasized one and ignored the other, although it seems, if anything, the more promising of the two. Consequently, this paper emphasizes the road mostly not taken, in an attempt to redress the balance. It does so largely by contrasting Bacons methodological approach with Galileos, which are both now almost 400 years old. My slant is therefore more historical than most. I try to shed light on a current problem not by breaking new ground, so much as by breaking some old ground.

1 Bacon and Galileo John Herschels Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830) has been called the rst modern account of scientic method.2 In it he says of the Scientic Revolution that Galileo in Italy, and Bacon in England, at once dispelled the darkness, Galileo by his inventions and discoveries, Bacon by establishing induction as the alpha and omega of science (1830, 64,105).3 That view still prevails, and it is not inaccurate per se, but it is misleading; for as Herschel also says (ibid. 210), the scientic revolution spawned two methodologies, and two concepts of natural law, one Baconian, the other Galilean.4 Both were empirically based on observation rather than the word of authority; and both were logically inductive rather than deductive. But in the sense of bottom-up generalization from observed instances, only Bacons methodology was inductive. If there was one approach to experiment that would never have occurred to Galileo, Dominique Dubarle tells us (1967, 311), it was the one empiricists and positivists are wont to extol: deploy all the available techniques of measurement, gather all the facts one can, and wring from these, via induction, a new law.5 Einstein said in a 1919 article Induction and Deduction in Physics (2000, 237) that the truly great advances in our understanding of nature originated in a way almost diametrically opposed to induction. The Baconian method has been so
Caws (1967, 341). Herschels book also came out in Lardners Cyclopedia in 1831, which is sometimes given as the date of the work.
3 2

There being no standard or well-known edition of Herschels Preliminary Discourse, I cite universal section numbers, rather than page numbers. For other historical sources I use both the original reference, where possible, and the modern editions page numbers. Cassirer (1942) gives a nice informal account of the Galilean methodological revolution. This is the conventional meaning of induction, and the one I assume throughout this paper, although induction was sometimes used as a catchall term for empiricism; and see below, n. 24. To be sure, in the New Organon (Aphorism 95; 1960, 93) Bacon does assert the need to combine experimental and rational. Scientists should not be like ants, which merely collect material, or spiders, which merely make cobwebs out of their own substance, but rather like bees, which produce something altered and digested. But this thought did not nd its way to center-stage in Bacons system.

4 5

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dominant, however, that even relatively recent Nobel scientists like Francois Jacob report having to learn for themselves that inductivism alone is not enough. Contrary to what I once thought, scientic progress did not consist simply in observing, in accumulating experimental facts and drawing up a theory from them. It began with the invention of a possible world, or a fragment thereof, which was then compared by experimentation with the real world. And it was this constant dialogue between imagination and experiment that allowed one to form an increasingly ne-grained conception of what is called reality. (Jacob 1988, 225) We philosophers may need to learn this lesson in dealing with the ceteris paribus proviso. Up to now, we have viewed it predominantly through a Baconian lens; but that has not gotten us very far. The reason most laws are ceteris paribus laws, Peter Lipton writes (1999, 1), is that the world is a messy place. As conventionally understood, the function of the ceteris paribus clause is to address and separate the messy chaff of exceptions from the wheat of the main body of a law. The economist Alfred Marshall likened the ceteris paribus proviso to a pound (1948, 366) for stray animals. Unfortunately the pound is itself a messy place. On the one hand, stipulating all the things that must be equal is an exercise in terminal incompleteness. We cannot list, much less anticipate, all of the provisos for a given law (Wallis 1994, 415); we lack systematic criteria even for determining which provisos are nomically relevant (Hempel 2000, 241); and we cannot reliably tell large, frequent and important exceptions from small, rare and insignicant ones. On the other hand, not stipulating these other things renders the clause unfalsiable, if not vacuous. If A then B, or there again, perhaps not (Mott 1992, 335); heart stoppage causes death, except when it doesnt. Indeed, Galileo dealt a telling blow to Horatio Grassi (a.k.a. Sarsi) on this very point (1957, 273): All too prudently you have secured your position by saying that there is needed for this effect violent motion, a great quantity of exhalations, a highly attenuated material, and whatever else conduces to it. This whatever else is what bests me, and gives you a blessed harbor, a sanctuary completely secure. Even if we could complete a list of other things, the question would remain what they are equal to. One proposal has been to read ceteris paribus as ceteris absentibus, setting other things equal to zero.6 That condition is stronger than it needs to be, since we effectively get the same result if other things are equal to each other, so that their effects cancel out. But without knowing all the things that must be equal, how can we know to what extent they can be paired and counterpoised? One of the few points on which philosophers of science have agreed is that scientic laws must meet the conditions of lawlikeness and truth. All efforts to analyze lawlikeness, however, have met with notable lack of success. And the truth condition has proved nearly as problematic. The most interesting fact about laws
6

See Joseph (1980, 777778), Pietroski and Rey (1995, 104105).

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of nature, declares Michael Scriven (1961, 91), is that they are virtually all known to be in error. Cartwrights 1983 book title blazons: How the Laws of Physics Lie. Elsewhere (1980, 160) she writes less provocatively but no less plainly: There are no exceptionless quantitative laws in physics. It is no accident, then, that we now have a budding literature on truthlikeness, paralleling that on lawlikeness.7

2 Always or Never In principle, it seems a matter of indifference whether we state a ceteris paribus clause positively or negativelywhether we say that other things being equal, sugar will dissolve in water, or that other things being equal, it wont. Why, then, do we invariably opt for the positive version? The obvious answersome will think it too obvious even to mentionis that when sugar is placed in water, it usually does dissolve. Ever since Aristotle it has been a truism that science concerns what happens always or for the most part (Metaphysics 1027a20; 1941, 781). And as I am not the rst to point out,8 despite his disdain for The Philosopher,9 Bacons enumerative induction rests on the same basic idea. When we predict that the next x will be Fand for Bacon prediction is a primary function of sciencethat is because xs up to now have always or at least usually been found to be F. In the eighteenth century, this Aristotelian/Baconian philosophy of science received a big boost from Humean constant conjunction. And in the nineteenth century, it received a double boost, rst from Herschels amplication of Bacons rules of induction in the Preliminary Discourse (1830), and then from John Stuart Mills amplication of Herschels treatment in his System of Logic (1843).10 Mills inuence soon eclipsed Herschels, which ushered in a century and more of positivism, from Auguste Comte to A. J. Ayer. A proposition expresses a law of nature, according to Ayer (1956, 154), when it states what invariably happens. Constant conjunction thus became the standard empiricist presumption, and now seems nearly ubiquitous, particularly in the literature on ceteris paribus laws (Smith 2000, 249). Karl Popper decried this deeply ingrained probabilistic prejudice, saying that we should be seeking theories with the richest, most interesting content (1963, 215219)precisely the ones most likely to be falsied. Nonetheless, ceteris paribus continues to be construed basically as a retreat from what always happens to what happens only for the most part. Against this backdrop, consider Snells law, which governs optically isotropic media. Most media in fact are optically anisotropic,11 so Snells law describes what
7 8 9 10

See Oddie (1996). See Lewin (1935, 5 and passim), Hall (1954, 184), Laudan (1968, 2021), Osler (1970, 34). Cf. New Organon, Book I, Aphorism 63 (1960, 6061).

Mill openly acknowledged his reliance on Herschels work (1973, 7: 414, and Introduction, xviii). Herschel, it should be said, was not a strict Baconian (Yeo 1989; Hankins 2006, 621). But then, contrary to popular belief, neither was Mill; see below, Sect. 5.
11

See Cartwright (1980, 160).

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usually doesnt happen. And Snells is not an isolated case. Far from addressing what happens always, or even for the most part, laws of free fall, ideal gases, perfect competitionlaws familiar not just to scientists, but to the lay public as well address what happens ideally, and so never.12 The strict empiricist has historically looked with a jaundiced eye on such science ction. How can ideal cases be as informative as what is before our eyes, or detectable with instruments, or inferable from some combination of these? What good is a law that holds for cases that never occur? What happens to experimental method if some of our most important laws describe things we cannot observe, things that do not even exist? These are old, tired questions, notwithstanding that Galileo suggested some cogent answers to them centuries ago. To be sure, he left few markers along the path he was forging; so as Noretta Koertge points out, scholars have to glean his meaning from glosses and graftihundreds of methodological remarks interspersed throughout his scientic writings (1977, 389390).13 However, in his last work, Two New Sciences (sec. 17; 1974, p. 76), Galileo presented a straightforward, succinct statement of the method of idealization: If we nd in fact that moveables of different weight differ less and less in speed as they are situated in more and more yielding mediums: and that nally, despite extreme differences in weight, their diversity of speed in the most tenuous medium of all (though not void) is found to be very small and almost unobservable, then it seems to me that we may believe, by a highly probable guess, that in the void all speeds would be entirely equal. This method contains three components: empirical observations stated in quantitative terms; a continuum onto which these data can be mapped; and an ideal limit-case reachable by extrapolation (a highly probable guess) from the nal term of the continuum. An idealized law is conrmed if, as antecedent conditions approximate more closely to the ideal limit, the consequent comes closer to being fullled (Barr 1974, 59). As actual conditions approach the ideal, the difference for practical purposes between Galileos method and Bacons becomes less signicant; and some consider this the main question.14 But conceptually, the traditional ceteris paribus clause and its idealized counterpart have so little in common that they seem like different memetic species. One involves completing an indenitely long list of things that must be equal; the other obviates the need even to begin such a list. One addresses what usually happens, the other what never does. One focuses on potential falsiers of the main body of a law; the other pinpoints its precise locus of truth (the ideal limit-case). One segregates chaff from wheat; the other locates the two along a single continuum. One is messy, the other pristinely neat.
12 13

Well, hardly ever; see Asimov (1962, 72).

Galileos mechanics presupposes that absent interference, bodies persist in a state of rest or uniform motion, according to Olschki, but only once in a marginal note, he says (1942, 264), is this principle actually stated.
14

Pemberton (2005, 37), for example.

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3 Accidents Until the seventeenth century, abstract objects were taken seriously because they were believed to be real. But the scientic revolution brought a seismic shift from metaphysics to method, as Joseph Pitts 1992 subtitle puts it15; and ever since then the operative question has been merely whether such objects are illuminating. Stephen Toulmin, for example (1961, 57), posits ideals of natural order, not ve sense, but because they are fruitfulthey because they are true in any na take us further.16 Reality is tricky, though. In an obvious sense, going back to Plato and (for different reasons) Aristotle, what a thing would be if it were perfectly itself is what it really is, even if it never behaves quite that way. McMullin (1978, 233) speaks of Galileos law of free fall as true of Nature, even though in vacuo fall does not occur in Nature. Galileo himself even used the term incorporeal,17 but not, Koertge says, because he wanted to be a Platonist (1977, 402); he merely acted like one briey because he didnt yet know what to do about accidents.18 The problem of ceteris paribus is basically a problem of what to do about accidents. What Galileo did was to disregard them. Even in his early work On Mechanics (c.1593) Galileo announces that he is neglecting accidental impediments, which are not considered by the theoretician (1960, 172); and in Two New Sciences (sec. 276; 1974, p. 225) he re-iterates that no rm science can be given for these. He seems, for once, to agree with Aristotle that there is no science of the accidental (Metaphysics 1027a20; 1941, p. 781). However, they are not talking about the same thing. What Aristotle means by accidental here is that which is neither always nor for the most part (1026b32l; 1941, p. 780); he is contrasting accidental with essential. It is an accident, he says, that a man is pale (for this is neither always nor for the most part so), but it is not by accident that he is an animal (ibid. 1026b35). What Galileo means by accidental is closer to another concept of accident associated with Aristotle, i.e., the crossing of two unrelated causal chains. Koertge identies three types of accident in Galileos work: mathematical, physical and observational (1977, 39192). Impediments like air resistance and discrepancies between physical and purely mathematical entities are attributed to what Richard Westfall terms the grossness and imperfection of matter (1968, 79). On the other hand, measuring errors and other accidents of observation are chalked up to the grossness and imperfection of the scientist (natural philosopher). The problem with this nice division is that Galileo was inconsistent. It is possible, he says at one point (1967, 2078), to account in precise mathematical terms for impediments like friction and air resistance, and failure to do so is the fault of the calculator:
15 16 17

And see Strong (1936, 8, 135 and passim), Drake (1967, 263264). On this point, also see Friedman (1953, 10, 3334).

We must assume that the plane is, so to speak, incorporeal, or at least that it is very carefully smoothed and perfectly hard Galileo, On Motion (sec. 298; 1960, p. 65).
18

calls him a Platonist (1943, 347348). Wallace calls him an Aristotelian (1974, 79 and passim); Koyre

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Just as the computer who wants his calculations to deal with sugar, silk and wool must discount the boxes, bales, and other packings, so the mathematical scientist, when he wants to recognize in the concrete the effects which he has proved in the abstract, must deduct the material hindrances, and if he is able to do so, I assure you that things are in no less agreement than arithmetical computations. The errors, then, lie not in the abstractness or concreteness, not in the geometry or physics, but in a calculator who does not know how to make a true accounting. Dudley Shapere is no doubt correct that Galileos position was not clearly formulated, and probably he was not fully cognizant of the issue. We cannot be sure, therefore, whether he ultimately thought it possible, in principle, to give a complete account of nature, or whether he thought that an element of inherent and irremovable unintelligibility, as he says, is inevitable, because some accidents are hardwired into the natural world (Shapere 1974, 138). The nal quest in physics has been for a Theory of Everything that leaves no messy residue. Most scientists set their sights a good deal lower; still, they too believe that over time impediments can increasingly be subsumed under laws, and thereby let out of the pound (Marshall 1948, 366). Thus, protracted failure to make progress along these lines will be blamed not on our stars, but on ourselves. Even if we are the problem, though, is that because we are bad calculators? Maybe its our attitude. The Aristotelians looked at a swinging body, Thomas Kuhn says (1970, 119), and saw something falling with difculty; Galileo looked at it and saw a pendulum, which led him to an understanding of falling bodies and motion along an inclined plane. To Koertges list, then, I would add a fourth category of psychological accidents. I dont mean to suggest that theories are merely psychological phenomena, or that scientic theories are just thought-experiments, or that competing theories are incommensurable. And what I am suggesting is hardly new. Many besides Kuhn have considered the Scientic Revolution less a matter of uncovering new facts than of donning a new thinking cap (Buttereld 1958, 13), and seeing old facts in a new way (Shea 1977, x). Stillman Drake put it well (Galileo 1957, 3): The truly inuential and pervasive aspects of modern science are not its facts at all, but rather its method of inquiry and its criterion of truth precisely the things whose introduction created modern science. They were, moreover, rst made clear in the writings of Galileo.

4 Two New Sciences It is hardly surprising that Bacon and Galileo donned very different thinking caps, since Bacon did not grasp the importance of mathematics (Quinton 1980, 30, 47, 83), whereas Galileo (1957, 238) considered it the very language in which the universe is writ.19 Nevertheless, what made Galileos methodology revolutionary
19 Nor does Bacon seem to have taken much interest in the scientic work being done in his own day, whether by Galileo, Kepler, or even his own physician William Harvey (Quinton 1980, 79).

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was not that it was mathematical; the shift from Aristotelian qualitative causal explanation to modern quantitative description was well underway by the sixteenth century.20 Nor was approximation to an ideal limit-case new with Galileo; it goes back to Archimedes, whom Galileo said he never mentioned without a feeling of awe (1960, 300, p. 67).21 It is in introducing idealized laws into physics that Galileo seems to have been the rst (Bravo 1995, 109). In exchange for this forcing of the facts, this idealization, to quote Werner Heisenberg, Galileo obtained a simple mathematical law, and this was the beginning of modern exact science.22 Husserl too cited Galileos great invention of idealization, his measuring, guided by idealities as the conception which rst made physics possible. For this he put Galileo at the top of the list of the greatest discoverers of modern times (1970, 3637, 49, 53). Newton usually tops that list. And to confuse matters, we hear a good deal more about the method of Newton and Bacon than about the method of Newton and Galileo.23 The association with Bacon comes via Newtons Opticks, a far more inductive and accessible work than the austerely mathematical Principia.24 But it was the Principia, even then, that scientists considered revolutionary (Cohen 1980, 50); and it carried on and brought to completion the work of Galileo, not the work of Bacon (Cassirer 1943, 370). Newton cites Galileo numerous times in the Principia (1995, 52, 204, 208, 268, 270, etc.), so it is clear that he was one of the giants on whose shoulders Newton was standing.25 To be sure, Galileo extrapolates from real to ideal, while Newton begins with purely mathematical entities and moves by stages nearer and nearer to the conditions of the world of experiment and observation (Cohen 1994, 77). Still, both were trying to uncover what actually occurs in nature (Caws 1967, 7: 341).26 One thing Newton and Galileo did not succeed in doing was to get idealization onto the mainstream map of scientic methodology. As late as the 1960s, Ernest Nagel in Structure of Science (1961, 463466, 508509) and Carl Hempel in
20 21

See Grendler (2002, 428), Drake (1970), Kuhn (1970, 119120).

Tellingly, the two scholars who squared off about whether Galileo was an Aristotelian or a Platonist (cf. note 18) agreed that he was an Archimedean. And Finocchiaro even asserts (2008, 834) that Galileos physics was not designed to justify a prior commitment to Copernicanism, but to put forward an Archimedean science of motion.
22 23

In Wilber (1985, 60).

Finocchiaro writes (1980, 152) that the most striking fact about Galileo in the history-ofphilosophy books is the neglect he receives there.

To be sure, even in the Principia Newton uses the term induction in a way seemingly Baconian (e.g., 1995, 443, at the end of the General Scholium). But then, he uses the term deduction (e.g., Preface, 1995, 4), to mean any reasoning competent to establish a conclusion as warranted, which includes induction (Harper and Smith 1995, 160, n. 100).
25 Cohen thought Newton was overly generous in crediting Galileo with having grasped his own rst two laws of motion (1960, 159). But Newton was not known for over-generosity in crediting others; and Cohen himself acknowledged (ibid. 151) that the rst workable physics for heaven and earth derived from Galileo and attained its form under Newton. On Newtons debt to Galileo, also see Funkenstein (2005, 54). 26 Weisberg (2007, 645, 655) thinks Galileos aim was ultimately to de-idealize. He delineates three types of idealization, of which Galileos is only one; for our purposes, though, I think this one is enough.

24

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Aspects of Scientic Explanation (1965, 166171) discussed idealization relatively briey, and in sections devoted to the social sciences, evidently taking their cue from Max Webers ideal type. As Leszek Nowak noted in 1972 (533), Nagel and others were aware that idealization is utilized in science, but they nonetheless acted as if it isnt.27 The tide, however, may have begun to turn. By 1989 Cartwright was referring to the method of Galilean idealization as at the heart of all modern physics, going so far as to assert that lawsin the conventional empiricist sensehave no fundamental role to play in scientic theory (1989, 188, 185). We even see complaints by biological scientists of a cultural prejudice in favor of idealizationthe restriction of science, Stephen Jay Gould charges (1988, 336), to an idealized method touted as canonical in the high-prestige, so-called hard sciences of physics and chemistry.

5 Galileos Method in Economics Because some in the Erkenntnis issue on ceteris paribus view it through an empiricist, and others through an idealized lens, we nd no consensus there about whether economics is an exact (Cartwright 2002, 426) or an inexact (special) science (Earman et al. 2002, 282). And this is a matter of some moment, since the use of idealization in economics rivals that in physics. In fact, it is central to at least three of the most inuential theories in the history of the eld: Milton Friedmans Methodology of Positive Economics (1953) was the most inuential work on economic theory in the second half of the twentieth century, and the only work on methodology that most economists today have ever read.28 So it is signicant that in this positive theory (positive because it permits valid predictions [ibid. 14]), Friedman emphasized idealized laws in general, and Galileos law of falling bodies in particular.29 The most inuential nineteenth century work in the eld was J. S. Mills Principles of Political Economy (1848). Conventional wisdom has it that Mill was a strict Baconian inductivist (e.g., Caws 1967, 341). But in both his System of Logic (vols. 78 of the Collected Works) and his extensive writings on economics (vols. 25), it is clear that Mills allegiance to Bacon, however strong, was by no means consistent. Bacons conception of scientic inquiry, he declares in the Logic (1974, 8: 886), has done its work, and science has now advanced into a higher stage.
27 In fairness, Nagel (1963) fundamentally defends Friedmans use of idealization in economics (see below). 28 29

Hausman (1985, 235).

Earlier in the twentieth century there was much emphasis on Marx and Keynes. I am not aware that Keynes made use of the method of idealization; but there is considerable literature on Marxs use of it in Studies series on idealization. Ronald Meek has written about the connection between Marx the Poznan and Adam Smith (see Ross 1995, 417418). According to Nowak (1992, 24), Marxism went in the direction of either positivistic naturalism (Eastern Marxism) or idealistic anti-naturalism (Western Marxism).

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A revolution is peaceably and progressively effecting itself in philosophy, the reverse of that to which Bacon has attached his name. That great man changed the method of the sciences from deductive to experimental, [but] it is now rapidly reverting from experimental to deductive. [And] between the primitive method of Deduction and that which I have attempted to characterize, there is all the difference between the Aristotelian physics and the Newtonian theory of the heavens. (Mill 1973, 7: 482) The method that Mill here calls deductive he elsewhere calls proof by approximation which he characterizes, in turn, as a common and perfectly valid mode of inductive proof (ibid. 232233n). If this sounds very confusing, Mill may have been groping for an appropriate way to characterize what amounts to Galilean idealization: Though experience furnishes us with no lines so unimpeachably straight that two of them are incapable of inclosing the smallest space, it presents us with gradations of lines possessing less and less either of breadth or of exure, of which series the straight line of the denition is the ideal limit The inference that if they had no breadth or exure at all, they would inclose no space at all, is a correct inductive inference from these facts, conformable to one of the four Inductive Methods hereinafter characterized, the Method of Concomitant Variations; of which the mathematical Doctrine of Limits presents the extreme case (ibid.). Interestingly, Cartwright remarks (1989, 185) that what drove both herself and Mill to the idea of tendencies is the problem of Galilean idealization. She goes back to the notions of capacity and tendency,30 to analyze, not the old concept of ceteris paribus, but the new concept of idealization. To me this seems to muddy the waters, re-introducing metaphysics to explain what is clearer without it; others, of course, may disagree. I do concur with her view that the abstract claims which physical theory consists of do not describe regularities (what happens always or for the most part). What regularities there are, as she says (1989, 229), occur at a far lower level in science, long, complicated, and local. Nowak similarly thinks that each empirical science passes two stages in its development: inductive and idealizational, and in physics the methodological breakthrough is connected with the work of Galileo (1992, 16). Lewin likened the state of psychology in 1935 to the state of physics before Galileos conquest over Aristotelian ways of thinking. The rst question asked by most child psychologists, he observed, is: Do all children do that, or is it at least common? If not, the behavior loses almost all claim to scientic interest for them (1935, 1213). What psychologists did not understand, he thought, is that post-Galileo, whether the event described by a law occurs rarely or often has nothing to do with the law. Mills work, by his own account (1965, xcii), was originally conceived as an update and overhaul of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, the most important book

30

She considers the former a subset of the latter (1989, 226227).

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on economics in the eighteenth century, if not of all time.31 Smith considered Newtons law of gravitation the greatest discovery that ever was made by man (1982, 105); so it seems no coincidence that in his landmark work on political economics he denes the natural price as the central price to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating, such that under the condition of perfect liberty the actual (market) price and the natural price will coincide.32 Smith labored under no illusion that perfect liberty is either possible or necessary in the real world.33 His use of idealization here, like Newtons and Galileos, was methodological. That such prominent works on economics make central use of Galilean idealization should send a loud signal that this methodology is of primary, not just peripheral importance, in the social as well as the physical sciences.

6 Ambiguities and Other Misunderstandings Ceteris paribus is not the only term that is ambiguous between a Baconian and a Galilean reading. Galileos natural fall is fall that never occurs in Nature, strictly speaking, McMullin points out (1967, 16, 19); and that runs directly contrary to the entire Aristotelian tradition, within which the natural is what normally happens in the normal context.34 Tendency is another such term, as we can see from Felix Kaufmanns parsing of the law of price and demand (1944, 213): If the price of a good is increased, (a) the demand for it will tend to decline; (b) ceteris paribus, the demand for it will decline; (c) the demand for it will decline under conditions of perfect competition. We know that (b) is ambiguous between (a) and (c), between what happens for the most part and what happens at the ideal limit. But complicating matters, (a) contains its own ambiguity; for the term tendency signies not only what usually happens, but alsoindeed this is the primary denition given in Websters Ninthdirection or approach toward a place object, effect, or limit. It is also the sense used in Newtons Preface to the Principia (1995, 4), where he mentions the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets. In this sense, demand will decline as conditions approach the limit of perfect competition.
31 32

Mill, however, called it in many parts obsolete, and in all, imperfect (1965, xcii).

Wealth of Nations I.vii.15, 30; Smith (1981, 75, 79). And see Schliesser (2005, 35). Much as he revered Newton, incidentally, Smith also owned Galileos Opere (Bonar 1932, 72), and compared Galileo favorably to Kepler. He also credited Galileo, rather than Newton, with recognizing the need to combine experience and reason, fact and theory (1982, 8384, and Introduction, p. 1).

33 If a nation could not prosper without the enjoyment of perfect liberty and perfect justice, Smith says in Wealth (IV.ix.28; 1981, p. 674), there is not in the world a nation which could ever have prospered. 34 This Aristotelian, for-the-most-part bias leads us to emphasize the contrary-to-fact-ness of idealization, rather than its fruitfulness.

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The distinction may be of little practical signicance in largely market-driven economies. Conceptually, however, only on the Galilean reading will (a) be even roughly equivalent to (c); on the Baconian reading, the two will be as far apart as for the most part is from hardly ever. One common mistake is to consider idealization just an isolating device. It is a form of isolation, of course; but so is the conventional ceteris paribus clause. What is at issue is the difference in how these methods isolateby impounding or by idealizing. Idealization is part thought experiment, an attempt to individuate kinds of things, such as a frictionless surface, that lie beyond experience and can be reached only by extrapolation.35 Baconian generalization too involves an inductive leap, but not one that usually counts as a thought experiment, because little creativity is required there. Consider this remark by Sir Arthur Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World: Contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual. There are questions I have not addressed here about the relation between idealization and the conventional ceteris paribus clausebetween for the most part and never. How, for example, does the notion of perfect averageness, which falls at the apex of a bell curve, relate to the ideal limit-case, which falls at the extreme tail end, if not off the chart entirely? In short, much work remains to be done on this subject.

7 Galileo and the Ceteris Paribus Problem I have been exploring two disparate scientic methodologies that date from indeed, that constitutethe beginning of modern science. I have emphasized Galileos over Bacons because it has received less attention, and because I think, with Cartwright, Lewin, Nowak and others, that where applicable, it represents a more sophisticated and promising methodology with regard to the ceteris paribus proviso. However, I do not mean to set up an either-or dichotomy. As the comment by Nobel laureate Francois Jacob quoted at the start of this paper makes clear, the scientic process calls upon both approaches. There is always a balance to be struck between abstract and concrete, between simplicity and facticity. The problem has been that the balance has been skewed heavily toward Bacon, as Jacob implies,36 and needs, as I said, to be redressed. It may be that Galilean idealization, not unlike the old ceteris paribus clause, is in danger of what I earlier called terminal incompleteness; for there might be two or moreeven an indenite, unknown numberof axes along which idealization is

35 That led one scholar to describe Galileo as moving his experiment off the actual, physical inclined plane and into his mind (Kolak 1993, 46). I would say he went less from external to internal than from perceptual to hypothetical. 36

And see Gould (2000, 172) on this point.

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necessary, even for a single law like that of free fall.37 Perhaps the best counter to this potential objection is simply the usefulness and success of the method up to now. As John Losee points out (1972, 26), the fact that an idealized lever cannot be actualized did not prevent Archimedes from using the lever law to construct military catapults. And modern engineers seem to have no difculty in applying this methodology (Laymon 1989). Maybe we do best, then, to let sleeping problems lie. Some, including Morrison (2005) and Pemberton (2005), think that Galilean idealization is problematic even where it is applicable. I am not sure how to answer these objections, in part because I am not sure to what extent they go beyond methodology to substantive questions of physics or economics. Then too, if an idealization fails, that might be due to a misguided choice of what or how to idealize. In failing to take into account the possibility that housing prices might ever go down, some abstract economic models proved in 2008 to be fatally awed; but such aws, however egregious, are not telling against abstract modeling per se. There may also be lawsHeisenbergs Uncertainty Principle, for instancethat t neither the Baconian nor the Galilean model.38 But whatever Galileos methodology does not do, I think there are a number of ways in which it helps to dispel the darkness surrounding the ceteris paribus proviso. The ideal limit is effectively equivalent to ceteris absentibus, which, other things being equal, would make it very demanding. But other things are not equal, because the continuum spans a wide range of observables, from farthest to nearest the ideal; and whatever falls along the continuum need not reachor even approach ideality in order to count as lawlike.39 This is a mechanism for separating lawlike from messy exception-making conditions, which Galileo simply disregarded, by shifting the focus from potential falsiers to the ideal limit (the locus of truth). That enabled him to liberate ceteris paribus from the pound, and even to raise it to the level of theoretical science. It is a long way, of course, from discovering some idealized laws to rendering all ceteris paribus laws orderly. Many accidents remain impounded, whether because they are as-yet untamed, or because they are in principle untamable. Still, how many, before Galileo or since, have done as much? Picture the ideal limit-case as a kite, and the continuum as a string tied to it and grounded, as by a rock. Without the string, the limit-case would be just a pie-in-thesky unscientic idea; but without the kite, the continuum would be just a road to nowhere. Maybe one reason why we have found truth and lawlikeness so resistant to analysis is that we have assumed they are independent concepts. We may need to reconsider this assumption, seeing that Galileo joins these notions at the conceptual hip. One advantage of Galileos method of approximation is of interest mostly to philosophers, not scientists. This is that it nicely avoids the logical nuisance of a law rendered true simply by virtue of the falsity of its ideal antecedent.
37 38 39

I am grateful to an Erkenntnis reviewer for raising this question, which had not occurred to me. Again, I am indebted to an Erkenntnis reviewer for a suggestion along these lines.

Newton may be making a similar point in the Principia, saying: It will be sufcient if the angle is found by a rude calculus in numbers near the truth (quoted in Blake [1960, 322, n. 87], along with other, similar remarks by Newton).

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Finally, Galileos methodology suggests a very interesting reason to favor the positive statement of a ceteris paribus law over its negative counterpart. Aristotles explanation was that the positive version states the way, always or for the most part, things actually are. Galileos explanation is that the positive version holds where other things are mathematically orderly, whereas the negative one holds only under conditions that are messyindeed, unscientic. These two are in agreement about excluding what is unscientic; they just have radically different ideas about what counts as scientic and what doesnt. As Lewin may have been the rst to grasp (1935, 6), Galileos model of scientic laws went some distance toward eliminating the distinction between lawful and chance events, which is no small thing. Koertge too says (1977, 405) that with Galileo accidental impediments cease to be problematic; indeed, at this point the distinction between accident and essence starts to dissolve! Her meaning is doubtless close to Lewins; but as I said, I nd it confusing to interject Aristotelian language into Galilean methodology, since essence and accident are dichotomous, and do not map onto a continuum. McMullin too seems to be saying something similar (1967, 19) by suggesting that Galilean idealization, beyond merely clarifying concepts, ultimately denes science itself.40 That is a bold assertion, and nothing else that I say here depends on it. My conclusion is more modest, although not exactly timid. Where Newton united heavens and earth by the law of gravitation, Galileo united them methodologically, by connecting real and ideal. Donning a new thinking cap, he saw truth and lawlikeness where others had seenand still seeonly messy accidental interference.
Acknowledgments I wish to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for a grant under which this study was begun, and Lorraine Daston, Arnold Koslow, Ernan McMullin, Joseph Pitt, Eric Steinberg, and my Erkenntnis referees for helpful criticisms and suggestions. The usual caveats, of course, apply.

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