Talk:Ceteris paribus

Pronunciation
Q: how to pronunciate Ceteris ? R: in classical Latin, something like kehtehriss, with the stress on the first syllable; but nobody will notice if you say seh instead of keh; Encarta Dictionary says the best options (for English-speakers!) is [káytEriss pááribEs, séttEriss párrEbEss], where E sounds like a in about or i in edible. Velho 00:28, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Translation
I changed the literal translation, since ceteris paribus is in the ablative (that's the with) and the verb for to be (esse) is often omitted in Latin. Velho 00:33, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

How will be transfered this term Kaur.rash (talk) 08:44, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

How to Decline the Adjective par
The Latin adjective par (meaning "equal") observes the usual rules for Latin's third declension. It is a typical Latin adjective. The masculine and feminine forms look alike (omitting the vocative and locative forms, being as how they were historically absorbed into the history of the nominatives and genitive cases).

The adjective is declined as follows:

Singular  Masculine/Feminine    Singular Neuter Nominative    par               par Genitive      paris             paris Dative        pari              pari Accusative    parem             par Ablative      pare              pare

Plural    Masculine/Feminine    Plural Neuter Nominative    pares             paria Genitive      parium            parium Dative        paribus           paribus Accusative    pares             paria Ablative      paribus           paribus

The neuter forms of the Latin adjective par are declined exactly like the masculine and feminine forms but for the accusatives looking like the nominatives, and having the nominative form - in other words, par in the singular and paria in the plural.

Inter Alia and Ceteris Paribus
Inter alia is Latin for "among other things." Both alia and paribus have similar meanings, but paribus takes the ablative form because it goes with the adjective ceteris and forms an "ablative absolute" - a Latin construction that sets itself off from the rest of the sentence inasmuch as it functions like an independent clause, nearly a sentence unto itself. In the phrase inter alia, alia is a neuter plural also, but it takes the form it does because it is a first declension adjective instead of a third declension adjective, and the preposition inter demands an accusative in the nouns or adjectives that follow it. You could switch the adjectives around to say inter paria or ceteris aliis and arrive at similar meanings. (Respectively, among equals, and the rest of the others.

---

This notion is put to great use in Nancy Cartwright's 'How the Laws of Physics Lie' (Oxford University Press, 1983).

Rosa Lichtenstein

13/05/06

http://www.anti-dialectics.org

Leap year example
I don't much like the leap year example (no offence intended to the author of the paragraph), as I don't feel that really is what CP is about. February can either be a leap year or not - saying 'all other things held constant' doesn't really eliminate the possibility of it being a leap year, it's just a matter of probability really (about 1:4 chance), so I don't think this gives an accurate description of what CP really is. What I would suggest would be outside of CP here is perhaps the possibility of the earth speeding up suddenly and rotating twice as fast - though this is hardly an ideal example either as the definition of a day may well remain the same in this case (and just become shorter). But say the number of days in February did change in an unexpected way, that would be the situation you are trying to eliminate with CP. Leap years are something we know about and can predict, so I'd suggest we use a better example for this part. Here's the paragraph below. Richard001 07:55, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

''I say "If the current month is February — ceteris paribus — then it will last only 28 days," then the ceteris paribus clause is added in order to exclude the possibility that it is a leap year. Since there is a fixed set of rules that define whether or not the present year is a leap year, one could (in principle) eliminate the ceteris paribus clause from the analysis by rephrasing the sentence to "If the current month is February, and the current year is not evenly divisible by 4, then it will last only 28 days." (Actually the rules for determining a leap year are more complex than that; but there is a finite number of rules, and you could in principle include them all in the sentence.)''

I think the leap year example demonstrates the uselessness of the concept as a whole. How exactly is this different than saying "cutting the price of beef increases quantity demanded for beef ceteris paribus"? It isn't any different - in both cases you are trying to tell what usually happens wihout citing every condition that must be true for the same result to occur.

But how can you tell if a given february is a case of "ceteris paribus" or not if you don't even know what it is that has to be the same because it wasn't directly adressed?

Uselessness of the concept
This concept is utterly useless for the following reasons.

1 - Generality problem of induction

Since the entire state of the univers is not the same, and it isn't occuring at the same point in space/time, it is never true that all else is equal.

2 -

Even if you limit what is equal to only what will effect the outcome, the concept is still useless because you have to know what that is, which of course usually you don't.

3 -

Even if it's a case where you do know everything that could affect the outcome,(such as a human defined concept like the feburary example having 28 days unless it is a leap year) then you still need to have a way to recognize when the current situation is a case of all else being the same as before or not. For example if you came across a feburary, in order to use the statement "feburary has 28 days ceteris paribus" to determine that the encountered february has 28 days, you would have to know what has to be the same for the statement to apply. Which means you have to know that it isn't leap year, which defeats the whole purpose of ceteris paribus.

Real life experience seems to drive people to believe this concept is meaningful, but to counter this consider the following example.

You are in a football field and coach says throwing the ball will cause it to fly down field. Consider the 3 following occurences.

1. If you run up and block the ball when he throws it, then he says "well of course it won't fly down the field if you block it, I meant if noone blocked it". In this case both you and the coach knew ahead of time that blocking the ball would invalidate his claim, so it is pointless for him to say "ceteris paribus" as it excludes no scenario that you did not already know would effect the outcome.

2. The coach throws the ball, but the wind is so strong that the ball doesn't go anywhere. The coach stands there dumbfounded. The coach did not realize the wind could invalidate his claim. Therefore his claim was based on ignorance, and a statement of "ceteris paribus" communicates nothing in this case either as it cannot communicate the exclusion of something the coach did not even know about when he said it.

3. The coach pulls out a lead football that looks like a normal one and throws it. You did not know the football was made out of lead as you cannot tell by looking out it. "ceteris paribus" also does not allow you to rule out this scenario, as you cannot tell the difference between this and any other time the coach throws the football to know if "all else is equal".

4.  The coach, being experienced in the ways of football, happens to know that on days of the week with a m in the name, footballs don't fly down the field when thrown. The coach might say the ball will fly down the field when thrown "ceteris paribus" and know that it being monday is one of the things that would make things different. However since you do not know that it being monday makes a difference, the statement still does not communicate anything you can use to determine the outcome.

Someone please feel free to give an example where this concept is not useless?


 * You have completely misused the term and your own example would suffice if you used it properly. It would be as if the coach says “As Jimmy throws the ball closer to the 45 degree angle with the field, he is able to throw the ball farther down the field, ceteris paribus.”  He is passing information on to someone, asking them to take into account the fact that this is not a full explanation of cause and effect (wind, how hard he threw it, whether the ball is made of lead, etc., also play a strong role in the outcome), and yet it is information that is true and worth noting.  In other words, the angle may NEVER correspond with the distance during a particular game because of various other factors, but the original statement would still be valid and worth noting.70.144.90.132 (talk) 20:33, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Comment: I think you are systematically misunderstanding the concept behind Ceteris clauses. The usage and purpose is not to claim that all things are actually equal but rather to

(a) Nod towards the concept that all things are conditionally held and may depend on unidentified factors (b) Proclaim certain factors that are explicitly named in a ceteris clause to an argument (c) Invoke generally accepted unproven/unprovable axioms (d) Assert in an explicit ceteris clause specific assumptions or even contrafactuals in order to play out a logical argument

Without the vehicle of the ceteris clause, no argument using mathematics or logic is possible. For example, the preceding sentence relies on certain Aristotelian axioms of logic that are not provable but on which such a sentence depends for coherence.

Even the most basic axioms of Identity and Non-Identity are not provable but are necessary for any logical construct to be formed. Thus invoking any logical claim implicitly declares a ceteris clause containing the assumption that all the standard rules of logic will be held to be true.

In the case of Popper’s falsifiability, the ceteris clause is that we accept for arguments sake that a critical test failed due to a weakness in the theory and not because of some equipment malfunction, act of God, or other force as yet unknown to science.

An ungrounded or instrumentalist theory in science may also be launched with an appropriate set of assumptions that may be declared overtly in a ceteris clause, or if the audience is thought to already understand the ceteris clause, not announced at all.

Without the ceteris clause much of science, mathematics, and logic will cease to be usable.

Regards Matthew Loxton pentaetn@hotmail.com

Usefulness of the concept
I don't see this term as useless at all. To give an example:

Imagine you have programmed a computer to play poker and are now describing it's style of play. You have ranked all starting hands from best to worst and now you make the statement: "The better a hand my program has, the higher a share of it's stack will it bet initially". In this case it makes a huge difference whether you say ceteris paribus. If you DO add ceteris paribus the program can include other factors than hand rank, such as position on the table, history of other players' actions, stack size, blind size etc, and these factors will be strong enough to override the rank-bet factor. If you DON'T add ceteris paribus, then your program will either a) deterministically base it's betting value on the rank of it's hand alone or b) give other factors so little weight that they cannot prevent a higher rank from making the bet moving upwards (but perhaps make it move upwards less than it otherwise would have).

Of course this example works within a specified framework with it's own fixed rules (poker rules) and institutions (functioning computers and electrical supply). Unfix these and there will of course ALWAYS be a ceteris paribus needed just in case of that apocalyptic meteor strike which wipes out humans and computer programs alike. But within given implicit or explicit frameworks, ceteris paribus, can make real qualitative difference.

- Eagersnap 18/10/06

The usefulness or not of the concept is irrelevant to the article. It is your opinion but WTF cares? It believe that the idea of God idiotic but I have no interest in putting this opinion into the page talk of a wikipedia article on the Christian God. The most widely known critique of a concept do belong in the criticism section of a page - the talk page should discuss whether any criticism is widely known or not and fairly presented or not. The actual validity of a concept really isn't a subject for discussion HERE, since an encyclopedia is a summary of existing human knowledge, not a forum for perfecting that knowledge.

Also, there is not justification in the talk section or the history for the deputed tags on this apparently quite fine article. I am removing them. Add them back with comment if you want.

- RedHughs 7/29/07

Quality rating
I rated this article as "Start" class, only because of the poor section on the use of ceteris paribus in philosophy. The sections relating to the use of this term in economics are reasonably good, in my opinion. I am not qualified to rewrite the philosophical section — are there any philosophers out there who could give it go? —Aetheling 16:44, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Cereris paribus fallacy
I have seen a reference [1] to the cereris parabus fallacy that should probably be defined here. Presumably it means assuming all other things are equal when actually they aren't.

[1] http://www.google.com/buzz/114134834346472219368/M7qWtHmuXqC/Mathematicians-like-to-describe-geometric-spaces —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.130.212.212 (talk) 20:43, 16 October 2010 (UTC)