Results for 'mere addition'

975 found
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  1. Mere Addition and Two Trilemmas of Population Ethics.Erik Carlson - 1998 - Economics and Philosophy 14 (2):283.
    A principal aim of the branch of ethics called ‘population theory’ or ‘population ethics’ is to find a plausible welfarist axiology, capable of comparing total outcomes with respect to value. This has proved an exceedingly difficult task. In this paper I shall state and discuss two ‘trilemmas’, or choices between three unappealing alternatives, which the population ethicist must face. The first trilemma is not new. It originates with Derek Parfit's well-known ‘Mere Addition Paradox’, and was first explicitly stated (...)
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  2. Mere Addition and the Separateness of Persons.Matthew Rendall - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy 112 (8):442-455.
    How can we resist the repugnant conclusion? James Griffin has plausibly suggested that part way through the sequence we may reach a world—let us call it “J”—in which the lives are lexically superior to those that follow. If it would be preferable to live a single life in J than through any number of lives in the next one, then it would be strange to judge K the better world. Instead, we may reasonably “suspend addition” and judge J superior, (...)
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  3.  12
    The Mere Addition Paradox.Derek Parfit - 1984 - In Reasons and Persons. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Argues whether an outcome could be made worse by the mere addition of extra people who have lives worth living;why we should reject the view that it is best if the average quality of life is as high as possible. It discusses a paradox involving mere addition and the attempted solutions. It also explores new versions of this paradox.
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  4.  52
    The Mere Addition Paradox, Parity and Critical Level Utilitarianism.Mozaffar Qizilbash - 2002 - School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia.
    This paper uses a formal analysis of the relation of ‘parity’ to make sense of a well-known solution to Parfit’s ‘mere addition paradox’. This solution is sometimes dismissed as a recourse to ‘incomparability’. In this analysis, however, the solution is consistent with comparability, as well as transitivity of ‘better than’. The analysis is related to Blackorby, Bossert and Donaldson’s ‘incomplete critical-level generalised utilitarianism’ (ICLGU). ICLGU is inspired by Parfit’s work and can be related to the analysis of parity, (...)
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  5.  24
    Another Mere Addition Paradox? Some Reflections on Variable Population Poverty Measurement.Nicole Hassoun - manuscript
  6. The mere addition paradox, parity and vagueness.Mozaffar Qizilbash - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (1):129–151.
    Derek Parfit’s mere addition paradox has generated a large literature. This paper articulates one response to this paradox - which Parfit hirnself suggested - in terms of a formal account of the relation of parity. I term this response the ‘parity view’. It is consistent with transitivity of ‘at least as good as’, but implies incompleteness of this relation. The parity view is compatible with critical-band utilitarianism if this is adjusted to allow for vagueness. John Broome argues against (...)
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  7. Intransitivity and the mere addition paradox.Larry S. Temkin - 1987 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (2):138-187.
    In "Futurc Generations: Further Problems,"‘ and Part Four of Reasons and Persons} Derek Pariit raises many perplexing questions. Although some think his ingenious arguments little more than delightful puzzles, I believe they challenge some of our deepest beliefs. In this article, I examine some of Pariit’s arguments, focusing mainly on "The Mere Addition Paradox." If my analysis is correct, Parfit’s arguments have extremely interesting and important implications that not even Pariit rcalized. In Part I, I present ParHt’s argument (...)
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  8. Mere addition and the best of all possible worlds.Stephen Grover - 1999 - Religious Studies 35 (2):173-190.
    The quantitative argument against the notion of a best possible world claims that, no matter how many worthwhile lives a world contains, another world contains more and is, other things being equal, better. Parfit’s ‘ Mere Addition Paradox ’ suggests that defenders of this argument must accept his ‘ Repugnant Conclusion ’ : that outcomes containing billions upon billions of lives barely worth living are better than outcomes containing fewer lives of higher quality. Several responses to the Paradox (...)
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  9.  51
    Dissolving the Mere Addition Paradox.Timothy Mulgan - 2000 - American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (4):359 - 372.
  10.  68
    Temkin's essentially comparative view, wrongful life and the mere addition paradox.M. A. Roberts - 2014 - Analysis 74 (2):306-326.
  11.  95
    Intransitivity and future generations: Debunking Parfit's mere addition paradox.Kai M. A. Chan - 2003 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 20 (2):187–200.
    Duties to future persons contribute critically to many important contemporaneous ethical dilemmas, such as environmental protection, contraception, abortion, and population policy. Yet this area of ethics is mired in paradoxes. It appeared that any principle for dealing with future persons encountered Kavka's paradox of future individuals, Parfit's repugnant conclusion, or an indefensible asymmetry. In 1976, Singer proposed a utilitarian solution that seemed to avoid the above trio of obstacles, but Parfit so successfully demonstrated the unacceptability of this position that Singer (...)
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  12.  51
    A Problem in Standard Presentations of the Mere Addition Paradox.Oscar Horta & Mat Rozas - 2022 - Acta Analytica 37 (4):611-615.
    This paper argues that the Repugnant Conclusion which the Mere Addition Paradox generates is not the same as the one which a sum-aggregative view like impersonal total utilitarianism leads to, but a slightly more moderate version of it. Given a spectrum of outcomes {A, B, C, …, X, Y, Z} such that in each of them there is a population that is twice as large as the previous one and has a level of wellbeing that is just barely (...)
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  13.  76
    Social choice and normative population theory: A person affecting solution to Parfit's mere addition paradox.Clark Wolf - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 81 (2-3):263 - 282.
  14. An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox.Jacob M. Nebel - 2018 - Ethics 129 (2):309-343.
    I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, it (...)
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  15. Merely verbal disputes and common ground.James Miller - 2022 - Theoria (1):114-123.
    In this paper I offer a new characterisation of what makes a dispute merely verbal. This new characterisation builds on the framework initially outlined by Jenkins and additionally makes use of Stalnaker's notion of ‘common ground’. I argue that this ‘common ground account’ can better classify disputes as merely verbal, and can better explain cases of playing devil's advocate. (Paper published Open Access).
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  16. The book by Jesper Hoffmeyer is, to the best of my knowledge, the first monograph (and not a mere set of articles by one or more authors) on biosemiotics. This makes it exceptionally important not only for laymen, but also for many biologists and philologists/linguists, often ignorant of the very existence of such a neighbouring discipline. The book under review has an additional meaning and importance due to its style, which is not purely academic rather written for the general reader, and thanks to ... [REVIEW]Sergey V. Chebanov - 1998 - Sign Systems Studies 26:417-424.
     
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  17.  12
    Beyond mere repetition: On tradition, creativity and theological speech.Robert R. Vosloo - 2023 - HTS Theological Studies 79 (2):6.
    This article argues for understanding Christian theological speech, including a Reformed engagement with confessions, as ‘traditioned creativity’. The argument is introduced by highlighting a theological hermeneutic that underlies the Belhar confession’s accompanying letter. This discussion points towards an account of Christian discourse that is ‘traditioned’ by the past but also moves beyond the mere repetition of the tradition’s authoritative statements. The article, therefore, affirms the need to distinguish between a living tradition and a narrow traditionalism. In addition, the (...)
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  18. The following classification is pragmatic and is intended merely to facilitate reference. No claim to exhaustive categorization is made by the parenthetical additions in small capital.Creole French Philippine & Middle-America Altaic - 1974 - Foundations of Language: International Journal of Language and Philosophy 12:309.
     
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  19. (Mere) Verbalness and Substantivity Revisited.Viktoria Knoll - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):1955-1978.
    Verbal disputes are often seen as closely related to a lack of substantivity. However, a systematic and comprehensive investigation of how verbalness relates to substantivity is still missing. The present paper attempts to close this gap. In addition to offering different conceptions of verbalness, the paper further develops Sider’s (Writing the Book of the World, OUP, Oxford, 2011) notion of substantivity. Ultimately, I argue for a more careful choice of terminology when it comes to assessing a dispute as “(merely) (...)
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  20.  37
    Parallel, additional or alternative histories of philosophy? Questions on the theory and methodology of the history of philosophy.Sotiris Mitralexis - 2018 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6):1222-1233.
    ABSTRACTMethodologies and theories for writing histories of philosophy are particularly relevant today due to the abounding challenges to the discipline that have emerged: e.g. the problem concerning the precise mode of the inclusion of non-Western philosophies in the history of philosophy, the response to postcolonial considerations at large, the transformative impact of new media and the question whether the history of philosophy is primarily a philosophical, rather than merely historical, enterprise. À propos the relative scarcity that is to be witnessed (...)
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  21. The following classification is pragmatic and is intended merely to facilitate reference. No claim to exhaustive categorization is made by the parenthetical additions in small capitals.Psycholinguistics Semantics & Formal Properties Of Languages - 1974 - Foundations of Language: International Journal of Language and Philosophy 12:149.
  22.  28
    Revisiting variable-value population principles.Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato & Kohei Kamaga - 2023 - Economics and Philosophy 39 (3):468-484.
    We examine a general class of variable-value population principles. Our particular focus is on the extent to which such principles can avoid the repugnant and sadistic conclusions. We show that if a mild limit property is imposed, avoidance of the repugnant conclusion implies the sadistic conclusion. This result generalizes earlier observations by showing that they apply to a substantially larger class of principles. Our second theorem states that, under the limit property, the axiom of mere addition also conflicts (...)
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  23. Mere Theistic Evolution.Michael J. Murray & John Ross Churchill - 2020 - Philosophia Christi 22 (1):7-41.
    A key takeaway from the recent volume Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique is that no version of theistic evolution that adheres largely to consensus views in biology is a plausible option for orthodox Christians. In this paper we argue that this is false: contrary to the arguments in the volume, evolutionary theory, properly understood, is perfectly compatible with traditional Christian commitments. In addition, we argue that the lines between Intelligent Design and theistic evolution are not as (...)
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  24.  33
    Nothing ‘Mere’ to It: Reclaiming Subjective Accounts of Normativity of Law.S. Swaminathan - 2019 - Journal of Human Values 25 (1):1-14.
    If the bindingness of morality was to rest on something as ‘subjective’ as the non-cognitivist says it does, the grouse goes, and morality itself would come down crashing. Nothing less than an ‘objective’ source of normativity, it is supposed, could hold morality in orbit. Some of these worries automatically morph into worries about the projectivist model of normativity of law as well: one which understands the authority or normativity of law in terms of subjective attitudes taken towards the law. As (...)
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  25.  96
    Composite Objects are Mere Manys.Simon Thunder - 2023 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 13. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 20-50.
    A ubiquitous assumption about composite material objects is that—if they exist at all—they are single things. This chapter articulates and defends manyism, which rejects that assumption. According to manyism, each composite object is simply its many parts. Since manyism accepts the existence of composite objects, it is distinct from nihilism; since manyism denies that composite objects are each one in number in addition to being many in number, it is distinct from the view known as composition as identity (CAI). (...)
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  26. A conflict between finite additivity and avoiding dutch book.Teddy Seidenfeld & Mark J. Schervish - 1983 - Philosophy of Science 50 (3):398-412.
    For Savage (1954) as for de Finetti (1974), the existence of subjective (personal) probability is a consequence of the normative theory of preference. (De Finetti achieves the reduction of belief to desire with his generalized Dutch-Book argument for Previsions.) Both Savage and de Finetti rebel against legislating countable additivity for subjective probability. They require merely that probability be finitely additive. Simultaneously, they insist that their theories of preference are weak, accommodating all but self-defeating desires. In this paper we dispute these (...)
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  27.  7
    Acyclic population ethics and menu-dependent relations.Susumu Cato - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-13.
    It has been shown that the Mere Addition Paradox occurs in a choice-functional approach with Path Independence (Stewart R.T., 2021, Path independence and a persistent paradox of population ethics, Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming). The present study is a three-part response to this finding. First, I show that Path Independence is not an essential property leading to this paradox and that logically weaker properties can get the same result. Second, I present a rationalizable choice function that does not yield (...)
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  28. Population Ethics and Metaethics.Gustaf Arrhenius - 2012 - Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 25 (1):35-44.
    This paper focuses on the relations between population ethics and metaethics. Population ethics gives rise to well-known paradoxes, such as the paradox of mere addition. After presenting a version of this paradox, it is argued that a different way to dismantle it might be by considering it as a way to change our standard view of justification in moral theory. Two possible views are considered: a non-cognitivist approach to justification and to the explanation of inconsistency in morals; Parfit's (...)
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  29.  10
    Bibliography on Plato's "Laws," 1920-1970: With Additional Citations through May, 1975 (review).V. Tejera - 1977 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (4):463-463.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews Bibliography on Plato's "'Laws, "" 1920-1970: With Additional Citations through May, 1975. By Trevor J. Saunders. (New York: Arno Press, 1976. Pp. i + 60. $15.00) The Penguin Classics translator of the non-Socratic Laws, as Leo Strauss called them, has here compiled in a most usable way a thorough bibliography of books and articles about the Laws or parts of them. The section "Texts, Translations, and Commentaries" (...)
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  30.  47
    Anti‐natalism is incompatible with Theory X.Fumitake Yoshizawa - 2024 - Bioethics 38 (2):114-120.
    The anti‐natalist philosopher David Benatar defends a position asserting that all life is harmful, and that it is, therefore, wrong to have children. In this paper, I critique Benatar's less‐discussed claim that his anti‐natalism provides solutions to population ethics problems, such as the Non‐Identity Problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, and the Mere Addition Problem, all of which are presented in Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. Since the publication of his Better Never to Have Been, Benatar has continued to claim (...)
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  31.  8
    Additional Sceptical Hypotheses.Bryan Frances - 2005 - In Scepticism Comes Alive. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    The argument template of chapter 3 is taken together with other live hypotheses to generate other kinds of live scepticism. For instance, one can focus on error theories with regard to colour, or pain location, or character traits. Or, oddly enough, we can plug in, as a live hypothesis, the hypothesis that no one knows any external world proposition. The upshot is that in intellectual communities, in which error theories about belief, pain locations, character traits, and colour are live, (...) mortals don’t know that fire engines are red, don’t know that they sometimes have pains in their lower backs, don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and don’t even know that they believe any of those truths. (shrink)
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  32. How Lives Measure Up.Molly Gardner & Justin Weinberg - 2013 - Acta Analytica 28 (1):31-48.
    The quality of a life is typically understood as a function of the actual goods and bads in it, that is, its actual value. Likewise, the value of a population is typically taken to be a function of the actual value of the lives in it. We introduce an alternative understanding of life quality: adjusted value. A life’s adjusted value is a function of its actual value and its ideal value (the best value it could have had). The concept of (...)
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  33. Person-affecting views and saturating counterpart relations.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (2):257-287.
    In Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1984) posed a challenge: provide a satisfying normative account that solves the Non-Identity Problem, avoids the Repugnant and Absurd Conclusions, and solves the Mere-Addition Paradox. In response, some have suggested that we look toward person-affecting views of morality for a solution. But the person-affecting views that have been offered so far have been unable to satisfy Parfit's four requirements, and these views have been subject to a number of independent complaints. This paper describes (...)
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  34. A set of solutions to Parfit's problems.Stuart Rachels - 2001 - Noûs 35 (2):214–238.
    In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit cannot find a theory of well-being that solves the Non-Identity Problem, the Repugnant Conclusion, the Absurd Conclusion, and all forms of the Mere Addition Paradox. I describe a “Quasi-Maximizing” theory that solves them. This theory includes (i) the denial that being better than is transitive and (ii) the “Conflation Principle,” according to which alternative B is hedonically better than alternative C if it would be better for someone to have all the B-experiences. (...)
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  35.  69
    Convergence to the Truth Without Countable Additivity.Michael Nielsen - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (2):395-414.
    Must probabilities be countably additive? On the one hand, arguably, requiring countable additivity is too restrictive. As de Finetti pointed out, there are situations in which it is reasonable to use merely finitely additive probabilities. On the other hand, countable additivity is fruitful. It can be used to prove deep mathematical theorems that do not follow from finite additivity alone. One of the most philosophically important examples of such a result is the Bayesian convergence to the truth theorem, which says (...)
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  36. Capacity for life force, communality, and the scope of cross-cultural bioethics: additional thoughts on African Life Force and the Permissibility of Euthanasia.Kirk Lougheed - forthcoming - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    I am honoured and grateful to the commentators for their thoughtful responses to my article, ‘African Life Force and the Permissibility of Euthanasia’.1 In the article, I attempted to show that any argument for the permissibility of euthanasia based on life force or vitalism is bound to fail because any ethic based on that worldview is required to preserve life above all else. Three key themes emerged in their responses and in what follows I address each of them in turn. (...)
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  37. Daoist Conception of Time: Is Time Merely a Mental Construction?Nihel Jhou - 2020 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 19 (4):583-599.
    There have been very few studies of the Daoist conception of time in either the West or the East. The only explicit study on this topic in the English literature is David Chai’s (2014). Chai maintains that “human measured time” manifested in myriad things in the Daoist universe is merely a mental construction, whereas the authentic time is cosmological time, which consists of neither an A-series (which is ordered by non-reducible pastness, presentness, and futurity) nor a B-series (which is ordered (...)
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  38. One more axiological impossibility theorem.Gustaf Arrhenius - 2009 - In Lars-Göran Johansson, Jan Österberg & Ryszard Sliwinski (eds.), Logic, Ethics and all that Jazz: Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel. pp. 23-37.
    Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with impossibility results which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies.1 All of these results have one thing in common, however. They all involve an adequacy condition that rules out Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion: (...)
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  39. The Very Repugnant Conclusion.Gustaf Arrhenius - 2003 - In Krister Segerberg & Ryszard Sliwinski (eds.), Logic, Law, Morality: Thirteen Essays in Practical Philosophy in Honour of Lennart Åqvist. Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University. pp. 29-44.
    Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. This field has been riddled with “paradoxes” which seem to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. Already in Derek Parfit’s seminal contribution to the topic, an informal paradox — the Mere Addition Paradox — was presented and later (...)
     
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  40.  45
    The Multiverse Theodicy Meets Population Ethics.Han Li & Bradford Saad - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    The multiverse theodicy proposes to reconcile the existence of God and evil by supposing that God created all and only the creation-worthy universes and that some universes like ours are, despite their evils, creation-worthy. Drawing on work in population ethics, this paper develops a novel challenge to the multiverse theodicy. Roughly, the challenge contends that the axiological underpinnings of the multiverse theodicy harbor a ‘mere addition paradox’: the assumption that creating creation-worthy universes would always make the world better (...)
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  41.  53
    Introductory Note. Population Ethics: The Unavoidability of the Quality of Life and the Ensuing Paradoxes.Gianfranco Pellegrino - 2012 - Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 25 (1):27-34.
    Population ethics is defined and presented, and some of the paradoxes it encapsulates are spelled out. It is argued that the concept of the quality of a life or of a life worth living can- not be avoided if inquiry on many relevant ethical and political topics is to be pursued in a theoretically fitting mode. In particular, the article deals with the asymmetry between rea- sons for not creating unhappy lives and reasons for creating happy lives, the well-known repugnant (...)
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  42.  51
    On parity and the intuition of neutrality.Mozaffar Qizilbash - 2018 - Economics and Philosophy 34 (1):87-108.
    On parity views of mere addition if someone is added to the world at a range of well-being levels – or ‘neutral range’ – leaving existing people unaffected, addition is on a par with the initial situation. Two distinct parity views – ‘rough equality’ and fittingattitudes views – defend the ‘intuition of neutrality’. The first can be interpreted or adjusted so that it can rebut John Broome’s objection that the neutral range is wide. The two views respond (...)
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  43. Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Additive Conception of Language.James F. Conant - 2020 - Nordic Wittgenstein Review 9.
    This paper argues that Wittgenstein, both early and late, rejects the idea that the logically simpler and more fundamental case is that of "the mere sign" and that what a meaningful symbol is can be explained through the elaboration of an appropriately supplemented conception of the sign: the sign plus something. Rather the sign, in the logically fundamental case of its mode of occurrence, is an internal aspect of the symbol. The Tractatus puts this point as follows: “The sign (...)
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  44.  50
    Parfits "Paradox der blossen Hinzufügung": Anstoss für eine untypische version des Utilitarismus.Fabian Fricke - 2002 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 64 (1):175-207.
    Parfit's Mere Addition Paradox seems to show that we must give up one of three very plausible beliefs about the relative goodness of certain outcomes, which would put a strong damper on our hopes of finding an acceptable theory of benevolence dealing with issues of procreation. I shall argue that such a result can be avoided if we challenge some basic assumptions about moral reasoning which underlie Parfit's argument. An alternative account of the nature of moral reasoning will (...)
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  45. Intensive and Extensive Quantities.Zee Perry - manuscript
    Quantities are properties and relations which exhibit "quantitative structure". For physical quantities, this structure can impact the non-quantitative world in different ways. In this paper I introduce and motivate a novel distinction between quantities based on the way their quantitative structure constrains the possible mereological structure of their instances. Specifically, I identify a category of “properly extensive” quantities, which are a proper sub-class of the additive or extensive quantities. I present and motivate this distinction using two case studies of successful (...)
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  46. What Should We Do About Future Generations?Yew-Kwang Ng - 1989 - Economics and Philosophy 5 (2):235.
    Parfit's requirements for an ideal Theory X cannot be fully met since the Mere Addition Principle and Non-Antiegalitarianism imply the Repugnant Conclusion: Theory X does not exist. However, since the Repugnant Conclusion is really compelling, the Impersonal Total Principle should be adopted for impartial comparisons concerning future generations. Nevertheless, where our own interests are affected, we may yet choose to be partial, trading off our concern for future goodness with our self-interests. Theory X' meets all Parfit's requirements except (...)
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  47.  54
    What is hierarchical selection?Ben Goertzel - 1992 - Biology and Philosophy 7 (1):27-33.
    It has been proposed that natural selection occurs on a hierarchy of levels, of which the organismic level is neither the top nor the bottom. This hypothesis leads to the following practical problem: in general, how does one tell if a given phenomenon is a result of selection on level X or level Y. How does one tell what the units of selection actually are?It is convenient to assume that a unit of selection may be defined as a type of (...)
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  48. The paradoxes of future generations and normative theory.Gustaf Arrhenius - 2004 - In Torbjörn Tännsjö & Jesper Ryberg (eds.), The Repugnant Conclusion: Essays on Population Ethics. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 201-218.
    As the title of this paper indicates, I’m going to discuss what we ought to do in situations where our actions affect future generations. More specifically, I shall focus on the moral problems raised by cases where our actions affect who’s going to live, their number and their well being. I’ll start, however, with population axiology. Most discussion in population ethics has concentrated on how to evaluate populations in regard to their goodness, that is, how to order populations by the (...)
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  49.  22
    Value Incommensurability: Ethics, Risk. And Decision-Making.Henrik Andersson & Anders Herlitz (eds.) - 2021 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Incommensurability is the impossibility to determine how two options relate to each other in terms of conventional comparative relations. This book features new research on incommensurability from philosophers who have shaped the field into what it is today, including John Broome, Ruth Chang and Wlodek Rabinowicz. The book covers four aspects relating to incommensurability. In the first part, the contributors synthesize research on the competing views of how to best explain incommensurability. Part II illustrates how incommensurability can help us deal (...)
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  50. Ceteris Paribus Lost.John Earman, John T. Roberts & Sheldon Smith - 2002 - Erkenntnis 57 (3):281-301.
    Many have claimed that ceteris paribus (CP) laws are a quite legitimate feature of scientific theories, some even going so far as to claim that laws of all scientific theories currently on offer are merely CP. We argue here that one of the common props of such a thesis, that there are numerous examples of CP laws in physics, is false. Moreover, besides the absence of genuine examples from physics, we suggest that otherwise unproblematic claims are rendered untestable by the (...)
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