ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that John Earman's account of differential equations may be inconsistent with his Mill-Ramsey-Lewis view of laws of nature. John Earman, John Roberts, and Sheldon Smith (ERS) insist on the eliminability of ceteris paribus (CP) conditions. In other words, they claim that if we use scientific language properly, CP clauses can be easily eliminated by known conditions. ERS give another example to bolster their claims about eliminability: " Johannes Kepler's 'law' that planets travel in ellipses is only rigorously true if there is no force on the orbiting body other than the force of gravity from the dominant body and vice versa". The topic of CP laws has become an important issue in the philosophy of science, particularly in the discussion of the status of special sciences such as biology, geology, economics, and psychology, which are different from fundamental sciences.
