The Dappled World¶
Cartwright, N. (1999). The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge University Press.
Cited by¶
1 citation across 1 artifact.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Ceteris Paribus
- A second move is to check whether the analysis is making implicit ceteris-paribus assumptions that have not been declared: most failed predictions in social science and policy trace to implicit "all else equal" assumptions that turn out wrong, and the remedy is to make implicit assumptions explicit, not to attempt the full coupled analysis, which is usually infeasible.
This sourceArgues that scientific laws — including in economics and social science — hold only ceteris paribus, under stable background ("nomological-machine") conditions, so predictions fail when the held-fixed conditions are absent or unstated; the remedy is to make those conditions explicit.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The book's abstract supports the idea that laws hold only under special, often unstated conditions, but it does not state that most failed predictions in social science and policy trace to implicit ceteris-paribus assumptions.
“laws are very special productions of nature, requiring very special arrangements for their generation”
- A second move is to check whether the analysis is making implicit ceteris-paribus assumptions that have not been declared: most failed predictions in social science and policy trace to implicit "all else equal" assumptions that turn out wrong, and the remedy is to make implicit assumptions explicit, not to attempt the full coupled analysis, which is usually infeasible.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 1 citation: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Registry ID ref:7f996f060038 · see in the full table