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The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science
In this book Nancy Cartwright argues against a vision of a uniform world completely ordered under a single elegant theory, and proposes instead a patchwork of laws of nature. Combining classic and newly written essays, The Dappled World offers important methodological lessons for both the natural and the social sciences, and will interest anyone who wants to understand how modern science works.
260 pages, Paperback
First published September 23, 1999
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July 17, 2026
The title echoes a famous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) that evidently lies close to Nancy Cartwright’s heart for its espousal, against the prevailing current of a traditional aesthetic, of a kind of beauty that resides not so much in overt splendor as in a subtle texture quietly woven into the fine detail of everyday creatures:
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.
Pied Beauty (1877)
The implication for her intellectual view of the scientific enterprise is that she will prefer a humble phenomenological law that reflects nature as we know it to a grand overarching theory that purports to derive that reality from a suppositious but de facto unknown speculative ground. The great question for Cartwright’s anti-foundationalist project as exposed in How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford University Press, 1983, just reviewed by us here), then, is to interrogate the procedure by which the scientist can, more often than not, arrive at the knowledge thus embodied in a confirmed phenomenological law. In other words, she urges us to set aside the goal most of us theoretically inclined practitioners pursue, viz., a completely satisfactory explanation from fundamental first principles, as illusory.
What is left to us, in Cartwright’s official stance, if we thus lower our sights? A simplistic empiricism of the sort advocated by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is bound to bear little fruit, as by reducing everything to bare observation reports somehow to be organized it thrusts aside our most versatile means of access to the natural world, viz., through our implicit understanding of causes. For the same reason, a strict instrumentalism of the kind forwarded more recently by Ernst Mach (1838-1916) is hardly realistic as a guide to discovery, whatever construction one might wish to put upon it as descriptive of a rightful attitude in the philosophy of science.
Thus, there is a crying need for some account of how scientists proceed in actual practice and of why they manage to tally up so many successes, an outcome inexplicable from either Bacon’s or Mach’s standpoint. Cartwright’s distinctive contribution is to dispute the normative view of the hypothetico-deductive method to the effect that somehow—magically, as it were—the scientist can leap by inductive inference to a law of nature that encodes and explains the regularities we observe in a particular problem domain. For her, as we have seen, the laws of nature we seem to know of do not really bear the burden of explanation anyway and it is better to discount them. In their place, she puts forward the concept of capacities, which we could summarize by saying that they are heuristics for building models of systems with components having specified properties when put into conjunction with others. Thus, for instance, we recognize a domain of electrical phenomena and are able to understand its regularities by attributing to charged bodies a capacity to exert forces on one another as expressed in formulaic terms by Coulomb’s law. A capacity should not be seen merely as a one-off item by which to formulate the phenomenological law behind a given experiment. To give an example (not due to Cartwright herself), Einstein’s photon idea enables one to provide an interpretation of the photoelectric effect—she would call such terms dispositions. Rather, a capacity is a general term that helps to interpret the dispositions exhibited in a wide range of phenomena.
The first publication to argue for a capacities-based philosophy of science is Cartwright’s Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement (Oxford University Press, 1989, our review here). Does she succeed in fleshing out her views in the later work we are now reviewing (viz., The Dappled World, published in 1999), leading to any interesting philosophical consequences? To this reviewer, at any rate, one can mark an advance in two areas: first, she wields her concept of capacities in order to make a sustained case against David Hume’s deflationary view of causation; and second, she expands upon the idea of what she will call nomological machines. These are intended to embrace socio-economic systems as well as laboratory physics. In this respect, they are similar to how Stuart Glennan analyzes the idea of mechanism as a tool for reducing experienced phenomena to order; see his The New Mechanical Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017, our review here). We want to revert to this comparison below and to play off Cartwright against Glennan, whose position would seem prima facie to be more conventional.
First, as to why Hume’s account of causation makes no sense:
My experiences are of people and houses and pinchings and aspirins, all things which I understand, in large part, in terms of their capacities. I do not have any raw experience of a house as a patchwork of colors. [p. 69]
Hume’s immediate context of post-Cartesian British empiricism is based on a copy theory of impressions. Cartwright brusquely rejects it as too simple a theory of concept formation. Let us collect a few more passages in order to convey the gist of what Cartwright has to propose against Hume:
Modern explanation similarly relies on natures, I will argue, though modern natures are unlike Bacon’s and unlike those of the Scholastics in that they are attributed to structures and qualities we can independently identify. Generally they differ from Bacon’s in that they do not lie on the surface and are not to be observed with the naked eye. We often need very subtle and elaborate experiments in order to see them. Modern science insists that we found explanation on experimentally identifiable and verifiable structure and qualities. But, I maintain, what we learn about these structure and qualities is what it is in their natures to do. [p. 80]
Rather, what is at stake is the question, ‘What must be true of the experiment if a general law is to be inferred from it?’ I claim that the experiment must succeed at revealing the nature of the process (or some stable consequence of the interaction of natures) and that the design of the experiment requires a robust sense of what will impede and what will facilitate this. The facts about an experiment that make that experiment generalizable are not facts that exist in a purely Humean world. [p. 87]
We tend to think that the order of warrant is parallel: the low-level generalizations come first and are most secure; the more abstract law about the nature of the coupling derives what warrant it gets from the acceptance of the generalization. I want to urge that there is an aspect of warranting for which this picture is upside down. It is just to the extent that we acknowledge that the experiment is well-designed to find out the natures of the interaction described in the higher-level claim that we are entitled to accept the low-level regularity on the basis of the experimental results. We get no regularities without a nomological machine to generate them; and our confidence that this experimental set-up constitutes a nomological machine rests on our recognition that it is just the right kind of design to elicit the nature of the interaction in a systematic way. [p. 89]
This all raises for us the question, though, as to whether the common reception these days of the Duhem-Quine thesis about there being no crucial experiments might be wrong. What a Cartwrightian knowledge of natures can do is to establish a very strong prior on one particular explanation among all conceivable ones of why the crucial experiment turns out the way is does. In a subsection [pp. 95-103], an illustration is given by reference to the Newton-Goethe controversy (the reader interested to know more about Goethe’s theory of colors would do well to consult our review of his major work in this regard, Zur Farbenlehre of 1810, here). In effect, Newton’s experiment is crucial because it is designed to elicit the inner constitution of light and the refrangibility explanation is more natural despite that Newton investigated by no means the range of circumstances that Goethe did.
The agenda in the second half of the work is to campaign against the still-prevalent deductive-nomological paradigm. For Cartwright, it may be that it scores an occasional success here and there, but certainly it breaks down as soon as we strive to extend our explanations to embrace everything. The real world is just too causally diverse. For this reason, a covering law model is inappropriate for most work in economics. To spell out just one consideration, we may advert to her critique of game theory:
An example of the kind of process...by which economics becomes exact—but at the cost of becoming exceedingly narrow. The kind of precise conclusions that are so highly valued in contemporary economics can be rigorously derived only when very special assumptions are made. But the very special assumptions do not fit very much of the economy around us. [p. 148]
Thus, game theory may be faulted for its hubristic pretensions. To be realistic about the world around us, one will be forced to acknowledge that, in so far as we can identify regularities, they are not of the kind that apply always and everywhere, but usually admit exceptions. Hence,
Economics and physics equally employ ceteris paribus laws, and that is a matter of the systems they study, not a deficiency in what they have to say about them. [p. 151]
The same, I claim, is true of all our laws, whether we take them to be iron—the typical attitude towards the laws of physics—or of a more flexible material, as in biology, economic or psychology. J.J.C. Smart has urged that biology, economics, psychology and the like are not real sciences. That is because they do not have real laws. Their laws are ceteris paribus laws, and a ceteris paribus law is not law at all. The only real laws are, presumably, down there in fundamental physics. I put an entirely different interpretation on the phenomena Smart describes. As we have seen, if the topic is laws in the traditional empiricist sense of claims about necessary patterns of regular association, we have ceteris paribus laws all the way down: laws hold only relative to the chance set-ups that generate them. [pp. 175-176]
Let us hand Cartwright the parting shot, so to speak:
I want to argue that the fundamental principles of theories in physics do not represent what happens; rather, the theory gives purely abstract relations between abstract concepts. For the most part, it tells us the capacities or natures of systems that fall under these concepts...No specific behavior is fixed until those systems are located in very specific kinds of situations. When we want to represent what happens in these situations, we will need to go beyond theory and build a model, a representative model. And...if what happens in the situation modeled is regular and repeatable, these representative models will look very much like blueprints for nomological machines….To get models that are true of what happens we must go beyond theory. [pp. 180-181]
Now, a brief return to the issue mooted above of adjudicating between Cartwright and Glennan. Can we come up with a counterargument to Cartwright’s non-universalism from Glennan’s understanding of mechanism? Superficially, Glennan’s mechanisms bear an outward resemblance to Cartwright’s capacities. But the former remains committed to an ideal of explanation that for the latter must be deemed obsolete, the loss of which constitutes her grounds for abandoning fundamental laws. What justifies Glennan’s confidence in the continuing possibilities of mechanistic explanation? Naturally, he is not so naïve as to suppose the classic Galileian-Newtonian ideal to persist unaltered in an era of chaos and complexity theory—here, he does acknowledge a debt to Cartwright—but, with the nuance that the nature of explanation must change to become more high-level, Glennan’s confidence does not waver that, upon the exercise of sufficient ingenuity, experimental tests can be versatile enough for us to learn something useful about whether the participant entities we posit theoretically and the activities in which they are imagined to engage do exist in nature.
Compare the role of toy models in statistical mechanics? Yet with prudential judgment one can learn from them something about the behavior of more realistic systems. A good illustration of what we have in mind would be in the field of biological physics, in which the sheer complexity of the living cell defeats any reduction to exact mathematical models such as one can hope for in elementary particle physics. Nevertheless, via the adroit appeal to clever and tractable toy models, one can generate a fair degree of understanding of what goes on inside the cell. For further discussion of these points in the setting of molecular biology, refer to our review here of Kim Sneppen and Giovanni Zocchi’s Physics in Molecular Biology (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
In conclusion, Cartwright’s analyses in this and her previous books are a pleasure to read, even if one disagrees with some of her theses, owing to her consistently high level of intellectual seriousness displayed throughout (unlike anything one can find in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, first published in 1975). Reception of her mature work strongly reinforces this reviewer’s commitment to causal realism but stresses that the way causes interrelate in the real world can be complicated (as she says somewhere in passing, ‘science is difficult; but it has not so far proved to be impossible’ [p. 119]). In what amounts to her swan song, Cartwright has deepened her lifelong perspectives and expanded them into a cogent critique of the regnant Humeanism.
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.
Pied Beauty (1877)
The implication for her intellectual view of the scientific enterprise is that she will prefer a humble phenomenological law that reflects nature as we know it to a grand overarching theory that purports to derive that reality from a suppositious but de facto unknown speculative ground. The great question for Cartwright’s anti-foundationalist project as exposed in How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford University Press, 1983, just reviewed by us here), then, is to interrogate the procedure by which the scientist can, more often than not, arrive at the knowledge thus embodied in a confirmed phenomenological law. In other words, she urges us to set aside the goal most of us theoretically inclined practitioners pursue, viz., a completely satisfactory explanation from fundamental first principles, as illusory.
What is left to us, in Cartwright’s official stance, if we thus lower our sights? A simplistic empiricism of the sort advocated by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is bound to bear little fruit, as by reducing everything to bare observation reports somehow to be organized it thrusts aside our most versatile means of access to the natural world, viz., through our implicit understanding of causes. For the same reason, a strict instrumentalism of the kind forwarded more recently by Ernst Mach (1838-1916) is hardly realistic as a guide to discovery, whatever construction one might wish to put upon it as descriptive of a rightful attitude in the philosophy of science.
Thus, there is a crying need for some account of how scientists proceed in actual practice and of why they manage to tally up so many successes, an outcome inexplicable from either Bacon’s or Mach’s standpoint. Cartwright’s distinctive contribution is to dispute the normative view of the hypothetico-deductive method to the effect that somehow—magically, as it were—the scientist can leap by inductive inference to a law of nature that encodes and explains the regularities we observe in a particular problem domain. For her, as we have seen, the laws of nature we seem to know of do not really bear the burden of explanation anyway and it is better to discount them. In their place, she puts forward the concept of capacities, which we could summarize by saying that they are heuristics for building models of systems with components having specified properties when put into conjunction with others. Thus, for instance, we recognize a domain of electrical phenomena and are able to understand its regularities by attributing to charged bodies a capacity to exert forces on one another as expressed in formulaic terms by Coulomb’s law. A capacity should not be seen merely as a one-off item by which to formulate the phenomenological law behind a given experiment. To give an example (not due to Cartwright herself), Einstein’s photon idea enables one to provide an interpretation of the photoelectric effect—she would call such terms dispositions. Rather, a capacity is a general term that helps to interpret the dispositions exhibited in a wide range of phenomena.
The first publication to argue for a capacities-based philosophy of science is Cartwright’s Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement (Oxford University Press, 1989, our review here). Does she succeed in fleshing out her views in the later work we are now reviewing (viz., The Dappled World, published in 1999), leading to any interesting philosophical consequences? To this reviewer, at any rate, one can mark an advance in two areas: first, she wields her concept of capacities in order to make a sustained case against David Hume’s deflationary view of causation; and second, she expands upon the idea of what she will call nomological machines. These are intended to embrace socio-economic systems as well as laboratory physics. In this respect, they are similar to how Stuart Glennan analyzes the idea of mechanism as a tool for reducing experienced phenomena to order; see his The New Mechanical Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017, our review here). We want to revert to this comparison below and to play off Cartwright against Glennan, whose position would seem prima facie to be more conventional.
First, as to why Hume’s account of causation makes no sense:
My experiences are of people and houses and pinchings and aspirins, all things which I understand, in large part, in terms of their capacities. I do not have any raw experience of a house as a patchwork of colors. [p. 69]
Hume’s immediate context of post-Cartesian British empiricism is based on a copy theory of impressions. Cartwright brusquely rejects it as too simple a theory of concept formation. Let us collect a few more passages in order to convey the gist of what Cartwright has to propose against Hume:
Modern explanation similarly relies on natures, I will argue, though modern natures are unlike Bacon’s and unlike those of the Scholastics in that they are attributed to structures and qualities we can independently identify. Generally they differ from Bacon’s in that they do not lie on the surface and are not to be observed with the naked eye. We often need very subtle and elaborate experiments in order to see them. Modern science insists that we found explanation on experimentally identifiable and verifiable structure and qualities. But, I maintain, what we learn about these structure and qualities is what it is in their natures to do. [p. 80]
Rather, what is at stake is the question, ‘What must be true of the experiment if a general law is to be inferred from it?’ I claim that the experiment must succeed at revealing the nature of the process (or some stable consequence of the interaction of natures) and that the design of the experiment requires a robust sense of what will impede and what will facilitate this. The facts about an experiment that make that experiment generalizable are not facts that exist in a purely Humean world. [p. 87]
We tend to think that the order of warrant is parallel: the low-level generalizations come first and are most secure; the more abstract law about the nature of the coupling derives what warrant it gets from the acceptance of the generalization. I want to urge that there is an aspect of warranting for which this picture is upside down. It is just to the extent that we acknowledge that the experiment is well-designed to find out the natures of the interaction described in the higher-level claim that we are entitled to accept the low-level regularity on the basis of the experimental results. We get no regularities without a nomological machine to generate them; and our confidence that this experimental set-up constitutes a nomological machine rests on our recognition that it is just the right kind of design to elicit the nature of the interaction in a systematic way. [p. 89]
This all raises for us the question, though, as to whether the common reception these days of the Duhem-Quine thesis about there being no crucial experiments might be wrong. What a Cartwrightian knowledge of natures can do is to establish a very strong prior on one particular explanation among all conceivable ones of why the crucial experiment turns out the way is does. In a subsection [pp. 95-103], an illustration is given by reference to the Newton-Goethe controversy (the reader interested to know more about Goethe’s theory of colors would do well to consult our review of his major work in this regard, Zur Farbenlehre of 1810, here). In effect, Newton’s experiment is crucial because it is designed to elicit the inner constitution of light and the refrangibility explanation is more natural despite that Newton investigated by no means the range of circumstances that Goethe did.
The agenda in the second half of the work is to campaign against the still-prevalent deductive-nomological paradigm. For Cartwright, it may be that it scores an occasional success here and there, but certainly it breaks down as soon as we strive to extend our explanations to embrace everything. The real world is just too causally diverse. For this reason, a covering law model is inappropriate for most work in economics. To spell out just one consideration, we may advert to her critique of game theory:
An example of the kind of process...by which economics becomes exact—but at the cost of becoming exceedingly narrow. The kind of precise conclusions that are so highly valued in contemporary economics can be rigorously derived only when very special assumptions are made. But the very special assumptions do not fit very much of the economy around us. [p. 148]
Thus, game theory may be faulted for its hubristic pretensions. To be realistic about the world around us, one will be forced to acknowledge that, in so far as we can identify regularities, they are not of the kind that apply always and everywhere, but usually admit exceptions. Hence,
Economics and physics equally employ ceteris paribus laws, and that is a matter of the systems they study, not a deficiency in what they have to say about them. [p. 151]
The same, I claim, is true of all our laws, whether we take them to be iron—the typical attitude towards the laws of physics—or of a more flexible material, as in biology, economic or psychology. J.J.C. Smart has urged that biology, economics, psychology and the like are not real sciences. That is because they do not have real laws. Their laws are ceteris paribus laws, and a ceteris paribus law is not law at all. The only real laws are, presumably, down there in fundamental physics. I put an entirely different interpretation on the phenomena Smart describes. As we have seen, if the topic is laws in the traditional empiricist sense of claims about necessary patterns of regular association, we have ceteris paribus laws all the way down: laws hold only relative to the chance set-ups that generate them. [pp. 175-176]
Let us hand Cartwright the parting shot, so to speak:
I want to argue that the fundamental principles of theories in physics do not represent what happens; rather, the theory gives purely abstract relations between abstract concepts. For the most part, it tells us the capacities or natures of systems that fall under these concepts...No specific behavior is fixed until those systems are located in very specific kinds of situations. When we want to represent what happens in these situations, we will need to go beyond theory and build a model, a representative model. And...if what happens in the situation modeled is regular and repeatable, these representative models will look very much like blueprints for nomological machines….To get models that are true of what happens we must go beyond theory. [pp. 180-181]
Now, a brief return to the issue mooted above of adjudicating between Cartwright and Glennan. Can we come up with a counterargument to Cartwright’s non-universalism from Glennan’s understanding of mechanism? Superficially, Glennan’s mechanisms bear an outward resemblance to Cartwright’s capacities. But the former remains committed to an ideal of explanation that for the latter must be deemed obsolete, the loss of which constitutes her grounds for abandoning fundamental laws. What justifies Glennan’s confidence in the continuing possibilities of mechanistic explanation? Naturally, he is not so naïve as to suppose the classic Galileian-Newtonian ideal to persist unaltered in an era of chaos and complexity theory—here, he does acknowledge a debt to Cartwright—but, with the nuance that the nature of explanation must change to become more high-level, Glennan’s confidence does not waver that, upon the exercise of sufficient ingenuity, experimental tests can be versatile enough for us to learn something useful about whether the participant entities we posit theoretically and the activities in which they are imagined to engage do exist in nature.
Compare the role of toy models in statistical mechanics? Yet with prudential judgment one can learn from them something about the behavior of more realistic systems. A good illustration of what we have in mind would be in the field of biological physics, in which the sheer complexity of the living cell defeats any reduction to exact mathematical models such as one can hope for in elementary particle physics. Nevertheless, via the adroit appeal to clever and tractable toy models, one can generate a fair degree of understanding of what goes on inside the cell. For further discussion of these points in the setting of molecular biology, refer to our review here of Kim Sneppen and Giovanni Zocchi’s Physics in Molecular Biology (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
In conclusion, Cartwright’s analyses in this and her previous books are a pleasure to read, even if one disagrees with some of her theses, owing to her consistently high level of intellectual seriousness displayed throughout (unlike anything one can find in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, first published in 1975). Reception of her mature work strongly reinforces this reviewer’s commitment to causal realism but stresses that the way causes interrelate in the real world can be complicated (as she says somewhere in passing, ‘science is difficult; but it has not so far proved to be impossible’ [p. 119]). In what amounts to her swan song, Cartwright has deepened her lifelong perspectives and expanded them into a cogent critique of the regnant Humeanism.
March 25, 2007
My favorite part of this book was learning about Herr Lessing, who points out that a fable is not the same as an allegory, because it is not symbolic, merely demonstrative. This seems like the best advice ever for a creative writer as well as a philosopher of science thinking about models.
January 17, 2026
This is a difficult book to rate (though not nearly as difficult as it was to read!). On the one hand, the theses expounded here should be absolutely required study for anyone who wants to do philosophy of science (especially foundations of physics or any work on the conceptual undergirding of economic theory). On the other hand, not only the exacting specificity of the examples given (thank God I had some basic grounding in the mathematics of classical and quantum mechanics; but I was still sent back to references and Google searches to try and keep up, especially in the later chapters!), but also the manner in which the author writes, make this an almost impenetrable book. Her way of structuring sentences is almost as confusing and jarring as her way of structuring her ideas and their connections to each other. I re-read so many sentences in this book....
That being said, I think Cartwright is quite right about much of this, and I think her insights can go far beyond even the applications she's given here (for example, into the fields of philosophy of mind, voluntary action, post-neo-Darwinian-synthesis evolutionary theory, etc.).
Bottom line: This book is a must-read and an almost-can't-read at the same time. And I have no substitute at present to offer, except to listen to her lectures (which are much more approachable) and then maybe read other people who think similarly to her (like John Dupré).
That being said, I think Cartwright is quite right about much of this, and I think her insights can go far beyond even the applications she's given here (for example, into the fields of philosophy of mind, voluntary action, post-neo-Darwinian-synthesis evolutionary theory, etc.).
Bottom line: This book is a must-read and an almost-can't-read at the same time. And I have no substitute at present to offer, except to listen to her lectures (which are much more approachable) and then maybe read other people who think similarly to her (like John Dupré).
February 20, 2023
I think it's cute when authors include simple illustrations in their books that are supposed to convey subtle concepts, like representing different scientific fields as balloons or the abstract concept of "weakness" as a grouse. unfortunately it's also MISLEADING
January 27, 2025
An excellent, thought provoking read. It is by no means simple, but a must-read for anyone seriously interested in the Philosophy of Science.
June 29, 2025
*Edit: A few months after I read this, I'm upping my original rating because I think of this book often. Very thought-provoking as a student and practitioner of physics.*
Cartwright begins this book by rejecting F=ma as a universal principle, which, as a student of physics, brought my hackles up immediately.
Cartwright argues against the universality of scientific laws, focusing on physics and economics, the two fields that claim the broadest domains of descriptive power (“imperialistic tendencies” LOL). I confess I skimmed or skipped many of the economics sections, and I can only speak to physics here. She says that theories of physics only apply to particular arrangements of the objects they describe. In some cases, I agree wholeheartedly, e.g., Coulomb’s law does not apply to two point charges when there’s an insulator between those charges. She does admit the existence of what she calls “covering laws,” like Maxwell’s equations and Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, that can better claim universality, but she did not discuss these in detail. The laws of physics, she says, do not describe what DOES happen but what CAN happen (capacities given the natures of the objects in question), and what DOES happen further depends on the particular arrangement and any additional factors at play. This, with her clarification of how natures and capacities in her thinking differs from Aristotelian natures, is a very helpful point.
Cartwright also claimed that much of our “laws” of physics are cases of overextended induction from our experiments. I take issue with this as well. It seems rather difficult to argue for or against using induction, because it’s induction, so I will leave this point. On a related front, she has an unfavorable view of what she calls “shielding”—the fact that physics experiments are conducted in heavily controlled circumstances that best allow us to make inferences about natures and capacities, and that we routinely ignore terms within our own laws when they are negligible in a circumstance. Imprecise and idealized as these may be, they are perhaps the most powerful tools in our scientific toolbox, and I don’t think it’s helpful to discount them in a philosophical treatise of science.
Cartwright begins this book by rejecting F=ma as a universal principle, which, as a student of physics, brought my hackles up immediately.
Cartwright argues against the universality of scientific laws, focusing on physics and economics, the two fields that claim the broadest domains of descriptive power (“imperialistic tendencies” LOL). I confess I skimmed or skipped many of the economics sections, and I can only speak to physics here. She says that theories of physics only apply to particular arrangements of the objects they describe. In some cases, I agree wholeheartedly, e.g., Coulomb’s law does not apply to two point charges when there’s an insulator between those charges. She does admit the existence of what she calls “covering laws,” like Maxwell’s equations and Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, that can better claim universality, but she did not discuss these in detail. The laws of physics, she says, do not describe what DOES happen but what CAN happen (capacities given the natures of the objects in question), and what DOES happen further depends on the particular arrangement and any additional factors at play. This, with her clarification of how natures and capacities in her thinking differs from Aristotelian natures, is a very helpful point.
Cartwright also claimed that much of our “laws” of physics are cases of overextended induction from our experiments. I take issue with this as well. It seems rather difficult to argue for or against using induction, because it’s induction, so I will leave this point. On a related front, she has an unfavorable view of what she calls “shielding”—the fact that physics experiments are conducted in heavily controlled circumstances that best allow us to make inferences about natures and capacities, and that we routinely ignore terms within our own laws when they are negligible in a circumstance. Imprecise and idealized as these may be, they are perhaps the most powerful tools in our scientific toolbox, and I don’t think it’s helpful to discount them in a philosophical treatise of science.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews