Abstract
This article maintains that an important class of scientific generalizations should be reinterpreted: they have typically been understood as ceteris paribus laws, but are, in fact, generics. Four arguments are presented to support this thesis. One argument is that the interpretation in terms of ceteris paribus laws is a historical accident. The other three arguments draw on similarities between these generalizations and archetypal generics: they come with similar inferential commitments, they share a syntactic form, and the existing theories to make sense of them are alike. Once these generalizations are properly understood as generics, the recent cognitive approach to generics can be extended to the study of the relevant sciences. The last section indicates ways in which this extension is fruitful for the two strands of research that we combine: the philosophy of science literature on generalizations and the semantics literature on generics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
“There is evidence that” is a hedge, see below.
When George Lakoff coined the term ‘hedges’, it referred to those “words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy” (Lakoff 1973, p. 471), where ‘fuzzy’ is to be taken in the logical sense. We are not directly concerned with this reading.
Of course, this conflation is exactly what economists are sometimes accused of making (Morgan 2012, pp. 405–409).
There are also reasons to reject the attribution of ‘loose talk’ to WUGS. For arguments in this direction about generics, see Nickel (2016, pp. 26–30).
We will not discuss in this article generics that are said to be habituals, e.g., Mary smokes after lunch, and kind predicating generics, e.g., Dinosaurs are extinct.
For a comprehensive presentation of the multiple attempts to analyse the semantics of generics, see Leslie and Lerner (2016).
Leslie’s project, like other empirically informed research in semantics, involves a transition from the study of patterns in the use of language to a theory about the truth conditions guiding the patterns. In her early work, Leslie used hesitantly the terminology of ‘truth conditions’ (see her distinction between “semantic truth conditions” and “worldly truth makers” in Leslie 2008, p. 43), but has been more outspoken recently (e.g., Lerner and Leslie 2016, p. 406).
In formal terms, we can write: “Ks are F” is true if and only if (NAC ∧ (CDF ∨ SF ∨ EPF)).
We thank an anonymous referee for helping us articulate this important distinction, which is not made in Leslie’s work.
Nickel (2010, sect. 3.1) discusses such similarities, except he dubs as “open-ended” what we construe as being non-monotonic. Unterhuber (2014) acknowledges the non-monoticity of inferences from generics (insofar as he accepts Delgrande’s logic for generic sentences) as well as their tolerance towards exceptions.
It is neither in On the Definition of Political Economy (Mill 1844) nor in Book VI of A System of Logic (Mill 1886), but he used the phrase 16 times in a non-philosophical context in his Principles of Political Economy (Mill 1848) and his well-known methodological characterization of economics as a deductive, inexact science is a primary influence on Cairnes (1888, see especially endnote 21), who seems to be the first to use ceteris paribus in methodological work. For examples of explicit use of the ceteris paribus clause prior to this period, see Persky (1990, pp. 87–89) and Reutlinger et al. (2015, sect. 2).
The general pattern that we found is that such phrases are used in the context of discussing theoretical models or results of statistical estimation. In this context, the phrase ‘ceteris paribus’ refers in a straightforward fashion to what would happen if the value of one variable in an equation was changed while keeping intact the other variables (for examples, see Cingano 2014, p. 28; Halteret al. 2014, p. 84). We also note that some scholars have an unusual fondness for the phrase (e.g., Piketty 2014 who uses it nine times in his admitedly lengthy best seller).
The context condition is important: if interpretive defaultness was not a function of the context, we could not explain why unquantified generalizations about mathematical models (see Sect. 2.3) are not generics although they share their syntactic form. We submit that, in this case, the generalization can be unmarked because, in the context of specialist-to-specialist conversations over mathematical systems, there is no great risk of misinterpretation when the quantifier is omitted.
Cognitive traits always play a role insofar as they determine what counts as negative.
If we were to focus on Leslie’s notion of ‘strikingness’, political and moral commitments would seem a more promising place to start the empirical enquiry since what is deemed ‘dangerous’ depends on what we value. Due to space constraints, we do not further explore this hypothesis here.
This phenomenon of “defaulting to generic” has already been documented in children and in adults (Leslie 2012, pp. 36–41).
Bibliography
Asher, N., & Morreau, M. (1995). What some generic sentences mean. In G. N. Carlson & F. J. Pelletier (Eds.), The generic book (pp. 300–338). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cairnes, J. E. (1888). The character and logical method of political economy. London: Macmillan and Co.
Cartwright, N. (1994). Nature’s capacities and their measurement. 1. Issued in paperback. Oxford: Claredon Press.
Cartwright, N. (2002). In favor of laws that are not ceteris paribus after all. In Ceterus paribus laws (pp. 149–163). Springer. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-1009-1_8.
Chomsky, N. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cimpian, A., Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2010). Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications. Cognitive Science, 34(8), 1452–1482.
Cingano, F. (2014). Trends in income inequality and its impact on economic growth. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/content/workingpaper/5jxrjncwxv6j-en.
Claveau, F., & Fernández, M. V. (2015). Epistemic contributions of models: Conditions for propositional learning. Perspectives on Science. https://doi.org/10.1162/POSC_a_00181.
Cohen, A. (1999). Think generic!: The meaning and use of generic sentences. Dissertations in Linguistics. Stanford, Calif: CSLI.
Crockett, M. J., Clark, L., Tabibnia, G., Lieberman, M. D., & Robbins, T. W. (2008). Serotonin modulates behavioral reactions to unfairness. Science (New York, N.Y.), 320(5884), 1739. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1155577.
Friedman, M. (2001). Essays in positive economics. Nachdr. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Fuller, D. A., Alston, R. M., & Vaughan, M. B. (1995). The split between political parties on economic issues: A survey of republicans, democrats, and economists. Eastern Economic Journal, 21(2), 227–238.
Fuller, D. A., Geide-Stevenson, D., & Ahmad, N. (2014). Polarization on economic issues over time—A survey of delegates to the national conventions. Journal of Economics and Economic Education Research, 15(2), 81.
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Giddens, A., & Sutton, P. W. (2009). Sociology (6th ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Halter, D., Oechslin, M., & Zweimüller, J. (2014). Inequality and growth: The neglected time dimension. Journal of Economic Growth, 19(1), 81–104. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-013-9099-8.
Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in scientific research articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Inman, P. (2014). IMF study finds inequality is damaging to economic growth. The Guardian, February 26, 2014, sec. Business. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/26/imf-inequality-economic-growth.
John, S. (2015). Inductive risk and the contexts of communication. Synthese, 192(1), 79–96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0554-7.
Kearl, J. R., Pope, C. L., Whiting, G. C., & Wimmer, L. T. (1979). A confusion of economists? American Economic Review, 69(2), 28–37.
Keenan, E. L. (2012). The quantifier questionnaire. In E. L. Keenan & D. Paperno (Eds.), Handbook of quantifiers in natural language. Studies in linguistics and philosophy (Vol. 90, pp. 1–20). Dordrecht: Springer.
Khemlani, S., Leslie, S.-J., & Glucksberg, S. (2009). Generics, prevalence, and default inferences. In Proceedings of the 31st annual conference of the cognitive science society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam_Glucksberg/publication/228808387_Generics_Prevalence_and_Default_Inferences/links/54ff9d750cf2741b69f91513.pdf.
Krifka, M., Pelletier, F. J., Carlson, G. N., ter Meulen, A., Link, G., & Chierchia, G. (1995). Genericity: An introduction. In G. N. Carlson & F. J. Pelletier (Eds.), The generic book (pp. 1–124). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krugman, P., & Wells, R. (2015). Economics (4th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers, a Macmillan Education imprint.
Lakoff, G. (1973). Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2(4), 458–508. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00262952.
Lange, M. (1993). Natural laws and the problem of provisos. Erkenntnis, 38(2), 233–248. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01128982.
Lerner, A., & Leslie, S.-J. (2016). Generics and experimental philosophy. In J. Sytsma & W. Buckwalter (Eds.), A companion to experimental philosophy (pp. 404–416). Hoboken: Wiley. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118661666.ch28/summary.
Leslie, S.-J. (2007). Generics and the structure of the mind. Philosophical Perspectives, 21(1), 375–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2007.00138.x.
Leslie, S.-J. (2008). Generics: Cognition and acquisition. Philosophical Review, 117(1), 1–47.
Leslie, S.-J. (2012). Generics articulate default generalizations. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes, 1(41), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.4000/rlv.2048.
Leslie, S.-J. (2017). The original sin of cognition: Fear, prejudice, and generalization. The Journal of Philosophy, 114(8), 393–421.
Leslie, S.-J., Khemlani, S., & Glucksberg, S. (2011). Do all ducks lay eggs? The generic overgeneralization effect. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(1), 15–31.
Leslie, S.-J., & Lerner, A. (2016). Generic generalizations. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Summer 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/generics/.
Marshall, A. (1920). Principles of economics: An introductory volume. London: Macmillan.
McAllister, M. M., Dubey, J. P., Lindsay, D. S., Jolley, W. R., Wills, R. A., & McGuire, A. M. (1998). Rapid communication: Dogs are definitive hosts of Neospora caninum. International Journal for Parasitology, 28(9), 1473–1479. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0020-7519(98)00138-6.
Meyer, M., Gelman, S. A., & Stilwell, S. M. (2011). Generics are a cognitive default: Evidence from sentence processing. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual conference of the cognitive science society (pp. 913–918). Boston, MA: Cognitive Science Society. http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2011/papers/0207/paper0207.pdf.
Mill, J. S. (1844). On the definition of political economy; and on the method of investigation proper to it. In Essays on some unsettled questions of political economy (pp. 120–164). London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Mill, J. S. (1848). Principles of political economy with some of their applications to social philosophy. Edited by William J. Ashley. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Mill, J. S. (1886). A system of logic: Ratiocinative and inductive. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Morgan, M. S. (2012). The world in the model: How economists work and think. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morgan, M. S., & Morrison, M. (Eds.). (1999). Models as mediators: Perspectives on natural and social science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nickel, B. (2009). Generics and the ways of normality. Linguistics and Philosophy, 31(6), 629–648. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9049-7.
Nickel, B. (2010). Ceteris paribus laws: Genericity and natural kinds. Philosophers’ Imprint, 10(6), 1–25.
Nickel, B. (2014). The role of kinds in the semantics of ceteris paribus laws. Erkenntnis, 79(10), 1729–1744.
Nickel, B. (2016). Between logic and the world: An integrated theory of generics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OECD. (2014). Inequality hurts economic growth, finds OECD research. OECD Newsroom. December 9, 2014. http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/inequality-hurts-economic-growth.htm.
Ostry, J. D. (2014). We do not have to live with the scourge of inequality. Financial Times (blog). https://www.ft.com/content/f551b3b0-a0b0-11e3-a72c-00144feab7de.
Ostry, J. D., Berg, A., & Tsangarides, C. G. (2014). Redistribution, inequality, and growth. IMF Staff Discussion Note. International Monetary Fund.
Persky, J. (1990). Retrospectives: Ceteris paribus. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 4(2), 187–193.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Prasada, S., & Dillingham, E. M. (2006). Principled and statistical connections in common sense conception. Cognition, 99(1), 73–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.01.003.
Prasada, S., Khemlani, S., Leslie, S.-J., & Glucksberg, S. (2013). Conceptual distinctions amongst generics. Cognition, 126(3), 405–422.
Reutlinger, A., Schurz, G., & Hüttemann, A. (2015). Ceteris paribus laws. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.) The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Fall 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/ceteris-paribus/.
Reutlinger, A., & Unterhuber, M. (2014). Thinking about non-universal laws: Introduction to the special issue ceteris paribus laws revisited. Erkenntnis, 79(S10), 1703–1713. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9654-5.
Robbins, L. (1935). An essay on the nature and significance of economic science (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan.
Roberts, J. T. (2014). CP-law statements as vague, self-referential, self-locating, statistical, and perfectly in order. Erkenntnis, 79(10), 1775–1786. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9641-x.
Spohn, W. (2002). Laws, ceteris paribus conditions, and the dynamics of belief. Erkenntnis, 57(3), 373–394. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021534428856.
Sugden, R. (2000). Credible worlds: The status of theoretical models in economics. Journal of Economic Methodology, 7(1), 1–31.
Unterhuber, M. (2014). Do ceteris paribus laws exist? A regularity-based best system analysis. Erkenntnis, 79(10), 1833–1847.
Uzquiano, G. (2016). Quantifiers and quantification. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Winter 2016. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/quantification/.
Woodward, J. (2002). There is no such thing as a Ceteris Paribus law. Erkenntnis, 57(3), 303–328.
Funding
This research has been financially supported by the Canada Research Chair in Applied Epistemology (Grant Number 950-230644).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Claveau, F., Girard, J. Generic Generalizations in Science. Erkenn 84, 839–859 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9983-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9983-x