Ceteris Paribus Laws

Robert Kowalenko

The best way to vaunt the advantages of our account is to contrast it with
Woodward (2002), for the latter asks many of the same questions we have asked,
retracing many of the steps we have taken, without, however, coming to the same
conclusion. Woodward notes that a common strategy among CP-laws advocates is to
show that CP-laws can be converted into strict laws by adding some further condition to
the antecedent, and goes on to study versions of the proposals of Fodor (1991) and
Pietroski and Rey (1995). He points out, as we have, that although introduction of the
notion of ‘completer’ and ‘interferer’ eliminates some of the extant counterexamples,
others slip through, leaving CP-laws vacuous. Woodward’s piece de resistance, is ‘CP, all
charged objects accelerate at 10 m/s2’. This “law”, just as our pseudo-law about nuts,
passes the purely semantic part of our account. After all,

For every charged object, there is an additional condition K (Having to do with

the application of an electromagnetic field of appropriate strength to the object)
that in conjunction with the object’s being charged is nomically sufficient for its
accelerating at 10 m/s2. Moreover, neither being a charged object by itself nor
being an object to which an electromagnetic field is applied is nomically
sufficient for undergoing this acceleration. (Woodward (2002), p. 310)

Given that classical electromagnetism is a powerful theory, we can expect there to be a

network of laws about K.
Woodward speculates that a natural extension of the completer approach would be
to add the requirement that ‘If all As are Bs is a CP law, As must “usually” be followed
by Bs’, i.e. to require, in our terminology, that the data in favour of the law is fairly
“clean”, and that outliers are rare (Ibid.). This is the simple idea—which we have
endorsed above in a special case—that for the generalization to be a proper CP-law, it
must hold in most of its intended applications: most As must be Bs. Woodward then asks
the right question, namely “What if only a few Bs are As?” (= what if outliers are
endemic?), citing a medical generalisation about the effects of chemotherapy on certain
tumors, as a case in point. Given that generalizations of this kind carry invaluable
information on the way in which factor A “makes a difference” for factor B, without,
however, necessarily giving rise to anything worth calling an actual regularity,
Woodward suggests giving up on the ‘completer’ approach to CP-laws altogether. He
appears to offer something of a general argument for this step: take the most obviously
vacuous hedged generalization of all, (V) ‘All As are Bs, except when they are not’.
Woodward argues that

[…] whether the conditions in [completer or interferer-theories] are satisfied by

some generalisation G cannot by themselves be what determines whether G is
non-vacuous, testable or otherwise legitimate, independently of what we know
about those conditions or whether we have the ability to independently identify
whether they are satisfied or what we intend or mean when we use G. It may
well be that in the case of (V) there is a condition K that is a completer for F
with respect to G […]. However, if, as is the case, (V) itself conveys no
information about what those conditions are or how to independently identify
when they obtain and we have no information about these matters from any
other source, it is hard to see how the mere fact that these conditions hold makes
(V) “legitimate.” (Woodward (2002), p. 313)

The complaint is that merely attaching a CP-clause to AB conveys no information

about what is most important for us, namely the way in which A makes a difference, or is
causally relevant, for B. This is ultimately the reason, according to Woodward, for which
we consider ‘CP, all charged objects accelerate at 10 m/s 2’ illegitimate: information about
the most important causal factor that makes a difference to the value of acceleration of
charged objects—presence of an electromagnetic field of the appropriate strength—is
“buried in the completer” rather than where it should be, in the antecedent. (Woodward
(2002), p. 315). However, a serious candidate for a causal generalization should tell us
about the conditions, which make for the variation of the correlated quantities, thinks
Woodward.
Woodward’s worries are, I believe, entirely appropriate, and I also believe that our
account in terms of networks of completers, yields obvious answers. It is correct to note
that there must be something wrong about a spurious generalisation such as, say,
CP ‘turtles overtake hares’, if most of the information about the way in which turtles
could actually achieve this is concentrated in an unfathomably complex completer (turtles
being somehow much bigger and stronger, having more flexible joints, a stronger heart,
etc.). However, the ad hocness of this sort of completer will insure that it plays no role in
other scientific applications, and that there is no corresponding same-completer network.
Woodward’s point about ‘causal information’ is legitimate insofar as it probably correctly
identifies one of the criteria that guides scientists in their search and study of completers
—one of the reasons for which a given completer does not show up in a network of laws.
I submit that our proposal is rather more general, however, as it is non-committal on the
criteria scientists actually deploy in hypothesis choice, some of which may have nothing
to do with causal relevance. (I shall address the problem posed by ‘CP, all charged objects
accelerate at 10 m/s2’ in an instant).
 What about Woodward’s complaint that it is not obvious why a particular causal
generalisation’s satisfying certain abstract conditions, specified a priori, should
determine whether it is non-vacuous, testable or otherwise legitimate, independently of
what we know about those conditions and our ability to independently identify them? To
reply to this is we can, again, point to the fact that the study of completing conditions is
an integral part of the scientific process of hypothesis choice and testing (cf. Lange
(2002), Glymour (2002)). We do not, precisely, accept a given generalisation with the
corresponding completer independently of what we else know about the completer (say,
just because it is jointly nomically sufficient for the consequent), on the contrary, we
accept it only if we have enough confidence to include it in our laws, and this certainly
includes the ability to independently identify it. The call for a network of completers was
the attempt to encode this practice in a short formula.
This leaves us with Woodward’s last worry, what we mean when we use a
generalisation apparently in need of hedging. He notes that when we say things like
“Administration A of drug D (according to a certain protocol) to patients with tumors of
type T causes recovery R”, we intend to indicate a causal connection between A and R,
not a regularity—which in actual fact is not there, because whether A is followed by R
depends on countless other factors, from diagnostic error to patient metabolism and
genetics (Woodward (2002), p. 307). How can we distinguish these legitimate causal
generalisations from ‘CP, all charged objects accelerate at 10 m/s 2’? Our response to this
problem has been, yes, we do intend a regularity between A and R here, but the purely
semantic account of CP-generalisations must be supplemented with a sophisticated
epistemological story: what we mean by ceteris absentibus generalisations is always a
function of our evidence, which in this case is rather messy, a “signal” under massive
amounts of noise. However, we have methods for separating the former from the latter
(see Sec. ). Woodward, although he shuns CP-laws and the regularity approach, also
solves the problem of ceteris absentibus-generalisations epistemologically, in fact, he
does so in exactly the same way as we do.
Woodward points out that the only way to test whether A and R are causally
correlated is to conduct an experiment, in which we randomly assign patients to a
treatment and a control group, thereby insuring that all other factors other than A are
roughly evenly distributed, so that any instantiation of R in the treatment group will be
attributable to A. (Woodward (2002), p. 313). This is, of course, standard scientific
procedure, in fact, it is an application of Whewell’s Method of Means. The advantage of
randomization, as Woodward puts it, is that it allows us to isolate causal factor A without
having to know what other relevant causal factors are, and without being able to ascertain
whether they are present or absent in any given case. Thus, he concludes, causal claims
such as AR can be tested even without knowing how to specify a completer, without
knowing whether there even is one, and without knowing how to independently explain
apparent exceptions.
But, of course, the completer-approach to CP-laws we have advocated requires
none of these things. Testing AR experimentally, as he recommends it, looks like a very
familiar curve-fitting problem. If we take our total evidence about patients with tumor of
type T, and plot it in a scatter graph showing relative change in health over time, we
might find that the data looks much like in our Figure 1, but reversed: little change or
gradual worsening for most, dramatic positive change for a few. Trying to determine what
caused these ‘outliers’, we will look at the circumstances of each improved patient, and
might find that he/she has benefited from administration A of drug D. To test the
hypothesis that A is a causal factor, that it “makes a difference” for recovery, we will of
course take a random sample of patients who received A, and test for R. Here, the picture
will still not be very clean, there will still be many patients showing no positive change in
health. However, the number of outliers, people with substantial recovery, will be greater
than in the control group, and if this result is systematic, the probability that it is due to
chance (the ‘null hypothesis’) can be shown to be low.
All this is standard procedure. To identify further causal factors, we will again
look at relevant similarities between the outliers. Suppose, this time, that we find three
commonalities between the outliers: metabolism of kind M, absence of genetic factor G,
and, of course, absence of diagnostic error of type E. We can again test the hypothesis
that M, G, and E are causally relevant to whether AR, by “controlling” for each of them
as above in further randomized experiments. The upshot of this research will have been
an important enrichment of the ceteris absentibus-clause in CP (AR), and an
improvement of our understanding of the conditions under which A succeeds to translate
its causal relevance for R into an actual regularity. The generalisation now reads: ‘CP,
administration A of drug D to patients with tumors of type T is followed by recovery R, if
factors M, G, E are absent’. We have enriched the CP-clause, not fully specified it, of
course, which is why this is still a non-strict regularity—but as Lange (2002) puts it, that
is scientific business as usual. The very research which, as Woodward notes, can be
undertaken without knowledge of the relevant completer, contributes to it.
The point is, generalisations CP(AB) that do not give rise to any substantial
regularity of As actually being followed by Bs are no more problematic for a regularity
theorist than for others, contrary to what Woodward suggests, given that standard
experimental methods can be interpreted as just as consistent with the search for CP-laws,
as with that for causal claims.i Moreover, remaining a conservative regularity- theorist
spares us the familiar embarrassment of having to say what ‘causes’ are, or ‘causal
information’. Witness Woodward:
 […] the generalization (3.1) “all masses of 5 kg accelerate at ten meters/s 2” has a
completing condition, since for each such mass there is a force that produces this
acceleration and it is the conjunction of the force and the mass that produces this
acceleration, not the force or the mass by themselves. However, we usually think
of the mass of an object as a fixed, unmanipulable feature of it – what accounts
for the variability in the acceleration of objects is the various forces to which
they are subjected. It is at least in part for this reason that (3.1) strikes us as an
unsatisfactory candidate for a cp law: the factor (or at least the most important
factor) – the applied force – that makes a difference to the value of the
acceleration is not made explicit in (3.1)

One cannot help but worry that ‘what we usually think’ will fail to yield a principled
method that’s correct across a wide domain for deciding what ought to count as the ‘most
important causal factor’ in a given case, or as ‘a fixed feature’ of an object (its essence).
In fact, in Woodward’s very example, what we usually think turns out to be quite false:
Woodward describes the case classically, however, according to General Relativity
massive bodies do not accelerate because a force, Gravity, is applied to them, in fact the
appearance of acceleration itself is illusionary. Massive bodies simply follow geodesics in
space-time, which, because mass determines the geometry of space-time, can sometimes
look like acceleration to us. Gravitational phenomena depend, Einstein has taught us,
through the geometry, on the distribution of matter. So, the most important factor for
(3.1) is, contrary to what Woodward says, the local geometry of space-time, and therefore
the mass of the object and that of other objects in the vicinity.

Causal claims such as AR are best intrerpreted as claims about the outcomes of
(potentially hypothetical) experiments, insofar as there is a counterfactual dependence of
R on A, ‘where the antecedents of the relevant counterfactuals are understood as realized
by process that have the characteristics of idealized experimental interventions’
(Woodward (2002), p. 317).
We can show that, in the absence of background knowledge regarding possible
interfering factors, it will maximize predictive success if we chose the generalisation on
which error variance is minimal. With background knowledge that
i
Cf. Earman, Roberts et al. (2002), pp. 289-90, for a similar argument (against Cartwright (1999), that most features of
experimental practice can by accounted for by a “Humean“ regularity theorist.