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Horgan and Tienson on Ceteris Paribus Laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Marcello Guarini
Marcello Guarini*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4; e-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Terence Horgan and John Tienson claim that folk psychological laws are different in kind from basic physical laws in at least two ways: first, physical laws do not possess the kind of ceteris paribus qualifications possessed by folk psychological laws, which means the two types of laws have different logical forms; and second, applied physical laws are best thought of as being about an idealized World and folk psychological laws about the actual world. I argue that Horgan and Tienson have not made a persuasive case for either of the preceding views.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 301 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support during the early stages of the research that lead to this paper. I also thank Ausonio Marras, William Demopoulos, and William Rappaport for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

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