The Metaphysics of Ceteris Paribus Laws

Abstract

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the eventual completion of this book which started its life as my doctoral thesis. This includes, first of all, my supervisor, Dorothy Edgington, without whose vivid interest, advice, and encouragement my dissertation would have been immeasurably more difficult to write.Amongst the many people who encouraged me with their comments on earlier drafts are

Better Best Systems and the Issue of CP-Laws

“…In (Schrenk 2007), I did not want to follow this route and I suggested a non-reductionist, yet, still Lewisian path to define what special science laws are. Independently, Cohen and Callender (2009) 16 developed a very similar theory for which they coined the apt name "Better Best Systems Account".…”

“…There, I rely on an idea which was first introduced by Braddon-Mitchell in his "Lossy Laws" (2001) but which has also been developed in (Schrenk 2007). …”

“…Better Best Systems and the Issue of CP-Laws 2 | 21 special sciences (Schrenk 2007(Schrenk , 2008; Cohen andCallender (2009, 2010); the apt name "BBSA" comes from Cohen and Callender).…”

The epistemology of hedged laws

“…In fact, the theory quite severely clashes with scientific practice. Schrenk (2007)'s account of special science cp-laws begins with the assumption of an epistemically ideal world, in which the best system of laws for each special science would contain a list of statements describing social, biological, psychological, etc., regularities appended with potentially indefinitely long lists of explicit exceptions (ibid.). In such a world, the cp-clause of each cp-law could be eliminated by fully describing the conditions the clause refers to; the resulting statements would qualify as the true laws of nature in virtue of their membership of the deductive system displaying the best balance between simplicity and strength.…”

RESTful Web service composition with BPEL for REST

“…The composition of RESTful Web services is also often associated with socalled Web 2.0 Mashups [10,11]. Emerging Web 2.0 APIs have gained a large following, since they use REST to manage the complexity and reduce the effort of scraping data out of plain HTML Web pages [12]. They have become popular with the mashup building community, where these services and data sources are combined and reused in novel and unexpected ways [13].…”