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 the (purported) laws of fundamental physics are not hedged by ceteris paribus clauses and (...) provisos. Furthermore, we show that not only is there no persuasive analysis of the truth conditions for ceteris paribus laws, there is not even an acceptable account of how they are to be saved from triviality or how they are to be melded with standard scientific methodology. Our way out of this unsatisfactory situation to reject the widespread notion that the achievements and the scientific status of the special sciences must be understood in terms of ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

I. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages roughly, Philosophical Investigations p)I 38 — 242 and Remarks on the Foundations of mathematics, section VI that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since the heyday of Wittgenstein scholarship in the early IIJ6os, must go to Saul Kripke's I4rittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It is easy to explain why. (...) To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein's.. (shrink)

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

Paul Boghossian has pointed out a ’circularity problem’ for dispositionalist theories of meaning: as a result of the holistic character of belief fixation, one cannot identify someone’s meaning such and such with facts of the form S is disposed to utter P under conditions C, without C involving the semantic and intentional notions that such a theory was to explain. Alex Miller has recently suggested an ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’ (modelled on David Lewis’s well known version of functionlism) and has argued that (...) this version of dispositionalism escapes Boghossian’s ’circularity problem’. Miller argues, nonetheless, that another of Boghossian’s criticisms of dispositionalism, ’the infinity problem’ still applies to this ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’: C will still draw upon a potential infinity of mediating background clusters of belief. The present paper argues that the feature that ’the infinity problem’ presents as problematic is a feature of a host of familiar explanations. Our fundamental difficulty in this area is not our inability to understand how a more general model can be applied to a particular domain (the intentional understood as dispositional) but our failure to understand that general model itself (dispositional explanation). (shrink)