Of course, many derived laws are ceteris paribus in a trivial way. It concerns especially laws in sciences like chemistry or biology, but there are plenty of those in physics as well. Models they come out of make simplifying assumptions applicable in special contexts only, and are not expected to work universally. Dynamics of ideal fluids is one example. I will describe two more interesting conceptions that support ceteris paribus laws "all the way down", one empiricist and one realist.
The laws of specialized models/theories mentioned above are called "effective" in science, and opposed to "fundamental" laws that are meant to be universal and exceptionless. Some theories originally intended as fundamental turned out to have a limited range of applicability beyond which their laws break down. Newton's laws, for example, break down at high velocities, the Standard Model at high energies, general relativity at small scales, etc.
Pessimistic induction on this historical experience leads some empiricists to submit that all laws are only effective, to be supplanted by those of later theories. Renormalization approach in QFT naturally lends itself to such philosophy because the renormalization procedure presupposes a high energy cutoff, at which the theory presumably breaks down, see Cao-Schweber, The Conceptual Foundations and the Philosophical Aspects of Renormalization Theory, pp. 66ff:
"Since nobody knows what the renormalizable theory at the unattainable higher energies is, or even whether it exists at all, we have to probe the accessible low energy first and design representations that fit this energy range. We then extend our theory to higher energies only when it becomes relevant to our understanding of physics. We thus obtain an endless tower of theories, in which each theory is a particular response to a particular experimental situation and none can ultimately be regarded as the fundamental.
[...] The epistemological position supported by the recent developments in renormalization theory, especially by the EFT approach, is empiricist in nature. Physical theories are justified by empirical data from which the theories are abstracted. They are effective instruments for organiz ing the data by imposing local order and coherence, and they conceive and express local causal regularities... This position rejects uncompromisingly the idea successively ad vanced during the last fifteen years by grand unified theorists, supergravity theorists, and superstring theorists that the development of fundamental physics will end with the discovery of an ultimate, definitive, and conclusive mathematical formalism. Rather, the development is taken as a process of successive extrapolations that is assumed not to have an end, with every step of the extrapolation being justified by a collective reinterpretation of theory and observation before and after the extrapolation."
The realist option also rejects the Galilean (or, perhaps, Platonist) conception of nature as a "book written in the language of mathematics" expressing its exact laws. But it adopts instead Aristotelian ontology of objects having individual causal powers ("propensities", "capacities", "dispositions"), whose exercise and interaction produces pockets of stable regularities under the right circumstances, ceteris paribus. And pockets of disorder otherwise. This is the "dappled world", in Nancy Cartwright's metaphor, that leads to the idea of disunity of science, advanced e.g. by the Stanford disunity mafia (Dupré, Hacking, Suppes, Cartwright) in opposition to the traditional optimistic unification through reductionism.
The most developed ontological proposal in this direction are Cartwright's "nomological machines":
"It is a fixed (enough) arrangement of components, or factors, with stable (enough) capacities that in the right sort of stable (enough) environment will, with repeated operation, give rise to the kind of regular behavior that we represent in our scientific laws."
Timpson in Quantum Bayesianism, pp.25ff describes how such ontology would support statistical interpretations of quantum mechanics:
"But how to think of this unspeakable micro-level? It is here that we can begin to
engage with some off-the-shelf ontology; for an immediate thought that might be
suggested is that we should opt for a conception in which the basic systems have
largely modal or dispositional characteristics, rather than occurrent, categorical
ones. Thus the systems primarily have dispositions to give rise to various events
when they interact with one another. Some of these events produced will be the
outcomes of interaction of smaller systems with the larger composite systems
(for example, measuring devices) with which we are familiar; and it is these
events that the Bayesian agent will update upon.
The ontological picture being borrowed from here is of course that of Nancy
Cartwright (Cartwright, 1999) who advocates an ontological picture for science
in which objects primarily have dispositions or powers and it is only when these
powers interact in highly contrived, or highly specialised, situations that they
will give rise to the repeatable, regular behaviour that can be described by the
kinds of general statements we traditionally think of as laws of nature, or as
lawlike truths. Where things differ in our case is that we are imagining that at
the fundamental level there are no situations, however specialised, in which we
will obtain lawlike behaviour. Interactions of the powers of our micro systems
always give rise to unruly results."
The "dappled world" picture faces challenges in the face of laws that do appear to be exact, see McArthur, Contra Cartwright for a critique.
