Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)

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Nancy Cartwright in the 1990s

Nancy Delaney Cartwright (born January 24, 1944 ) is an American philosopher and one of the most important scientific theorists of our time.

Life

Cartwright studied mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh (graduated in 1966) and received his PhD in 1971 from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a thesis on Philosophical Analysis of the Concept of Mixture in Quantum Mechanics .

She is Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the University of California, San Diego . Cartwright conducts research on the history of science , philosophy of science , economics, and physics . She is particularly interested in causality theory and the question of the objectivity of science.

Cartwright is included in the Stanford School of Science with John Dupré , Ian Hacking and Patrick Suppes . These are united by the critical handling of the reductionist ideal of unified science .

In the academic year 1987/1988 she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , in 1993 she was a MacArthur Fellow , and since 1999 she has been a member of the Leopoldina . In 2001 Cartwright was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2004 to the American Philosophical Society .

How the Laws of Physics Lie

Explanation vs. Description and truth

In her main work with the provocative title How the Laws of Physics Lie (≈ How the laws of physics lie) Cartwright differentiates between theoretical or fundamental and phenomenological (i.e. empirical) laws. The former are explanatory, the latter descriptive. Cartwright claims that fundamental laws can only be explanatory at the expense of their empirical adequacy . Assuming that truth in science is equivalent to empirical adequacy, this means, conversely, that laws do not explain much when they are true.

"The laws of physics, I concluded, to the extent that they are true, do not explain much."

- 1983, 72

In summary, phenomenological laws are true, but do not explain anything and fundamental laws have an explanatory function, but are not true.

causality

For Cartwright, however, scientific explanation does not coincide with causality. Explanatory fundamental laws provide no reasons for the explained phenomena. With Pierre Duhem , Cartwright assumes that fundamental laws only summarize and organize the phenomena.

Cartwright speaks of causality only when several different experiments suggest a specific reason. Cartwright cites in this context the experimental evidence of the existence of atoms by Jean-Baptiste Perrin .

In contrast to the contemporary empiricist Bas van Fraassen, Cartwright therefore believes in the existence of unobservable entities. For this reason, like Ian Hacking, she is referred to as an entity realist . Cartwright, on the other hand, calls herself an "anti-realist" because she doesn't believe that fundamental laws are true. It is directed against one of the realist's favorite arguments, the inference of the best explanation , since it claims that there are no best explanations, but always several equal ones. There is only such a thing as a “conclusion to the best reason”.

Ceteris paribus laws

According to Cartwright, theoretical laws of physics are ceteris paribus laws, i.e. always only valid under certain, ideal conditions. As an example, she cites Newton's law of gravity , which describes the gravitational pull of two bodies. According to Cartwright, the ideal state in which only gravitational forces act between two bodies is only fulfilled in the rarest of cases (another acting force is e.g. the Coulomb force ). Therefore the law can only be true under special - and not under actual - conditions. Cartwright refuses to interpret the forces actually acting between two bodies as a combination of gravitation and Coulomb force. She calls the laws of the respective forces a fiction, since they describe facts that in their pure form never appear in truth.

“Nature does not 'add' forces. For the 'component' forces are not there, in any but metaphorical sense, to be added. "

- 59

Cartwright gives another easy-to-understand example:

  1. Adding salt will shorten the boiling time of water.
  2. The cooking time is longer at lower altitudes.

Both laws only apply ceteris paribus: Law 1 only applies if the altitude is not changed and Law 2 only applies if the salinity of the water is not changed. Cartwright now suggests that there is no law that would describe what happens when you go to a lower altitude and also change the salinity.

Simulacrum explanatory model

Cartwright rejects the classic deductive-nomological explanatory model and replaces it with her so-called simulacrum explanatory model. This means that phenomena are explained by constructing a model for them that “adjusts” the phenomena to the theory (Cartwright speaks in the original of a “ prepared description ”).

"To explain a phenomenon is to find a model that fits it into the basic framework of the theory and that thus allows us to derive analogues for the messy and complicated phenomenological laws which are true of it."

- Cartwright 1983, 152

“The appearance of truth comes from a bad model of explanation, a model that ties laws directly to reality. As an alternative to the conventional picture I propose a simulacrum account of explanation. The route from theory to reality is from theory to model, and then from model to phenomenological law. The phenomenological laws are indeed true of the objects in reality - or might be; but the fundamental laws are true only of objects in the model. "

- 4th

A "simulacrum" means something that has the same shape or appearance as a certain thing, but not the same substance or the correct properties. The phenomena “adapted” to the theory are therefore not the true but falsified phenomena. In other words, adjusting the phenomena leads to a distortion of the real facts:

"I claim that in general we will have to distort the true picture of what happens if we want to fit into the highly constrained structures of our mathematical theories."

- ibid., 139

Publications

  • How the laws of physics lie , Oxford University Press, 1983 (English original edition: ISBN 0-19-824704-4 )
  • Nature's capacities and their measurement . Clarendon Paperbacks, 1989 (English original edition: ISBN 0-19-823507-0 )
  • (with Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, Thomas Uebel): Otto Neurath, philosophy between science and politics . 1996
  • The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science . Cambridge University Press, 1999 (Original English edition: ISBN 0-521-64411-9 )
  • Hunting Causes and Using Them. Approaches in Philosophy and Economics . Cambridge University Press, 2007 (English original edition: ISBN 978-0-521-86081-9 hardback, ISBN 978-0-521-67798-1 paperback)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter C. (PDF; 1.3 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved May 31, 2018 .
  2. ^ Member History: Nancy D. Cartwright. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 31, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Cartwright, Nancy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cartwright, Nancy Delaney
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1944