Daniela M. Bailer-Jones, "Standing Up Against Traditions: Models and Theories in Nancy Cartwright's Philosophy of Science"

    This essay reviews Nancy Cartwright’s work on scientific models with the aim to elaborate a distinction between models and theories that Cartwright has originally suggested. In her How the Laws of Physics Lie she portrays models as fictions. Later models graduate to being representative of concrete physical processes – while theories are characterized as abstract. According to Cartwright’s (later) ‘toolbox approach’, theories do not represent the world at all, but may be tools, among other tools, for the construction of models. Which theories might be exploited in a modelling effort and hold for a specific natural process is to be established ad hoc: the world is ‘dappled’ and theoretical laws do not hold always, only under specified circumstances. This paper critically discusses Cartwright’s methodology to put forward claims that are in agreement with scientific practice, i.e. a case-study approach to philosophy of science. It is this methodological approach that often results in different stories for different cases, a dappled world, but the point is made that it is doubtful how a more general philosophical position can be founded on this approach. Furthermore, the suggestion is rejected that, in the light of Cartwright’s characterisation of theories, theories can be true or false, even if true or false is meant to be of models. Finally, the paper elaborates what it means for theories to be abstract. One of Cartwright’s contributions lies in emphasizing the central role models in the practice of science, while distinguishing models from theories in a novel way. The contribution of this paper is to elaborate her claims and explore their consequences. 

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Ulrich Gähde, "Nancy Cartwright on Theories, Models and their Application to Reality: A Case Study"

    Nancy Cartwright has provided a detailed account of the relation between empirical theories, models and their application to reality - an account that has developed and changed over the years. The task of this paper is to analyze certain selected aspects of this account in some more detail by applying it to a concrete case study. This case study is taken from the history of astronomy: Edmond Halley’s discovery of the comet later named after him, as well as the subsequent attempts to obtain an adequate theoretical description of this system. In analyzing this case study, we will particularly focus on Cartwright’s distinction between the unprepared, prepared and mathematical description. Furthermore, we will pay special attention to the role models play in the process of describing this system. To a large extent, our considerations will corroborate Cartwright’s views. However, they will reveal certain snags of her position as well. Furthermore, it is argued that Cartwright’s views show both some striking similarities, as well as some interesting disanalogies with the structuralist view of how empirical theories are applied to concrete physical systems.

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Margaret Morrison, "Models as Representational Structures" 

   In order to spell out what it means to say that a model functions as a mediator some attention must be paid to the ways in which models represent physical systems. A model can mediate between theory and the world in the sense of being a more concrete representation of a physical system than that provided by a theory, or it can be used to apply theory to concrete cases. A model can also function as a mediator in its role as the object of inquiry. In other words, the model rather than the physical system becomes the thing that is being investigated; it represents the system by serving as its proxy. In that context the model is a source of ‘mediated’ knowledge because our knowledge of the physical system is limited, or the system is simply inaccessible. In order to flesh out these ideas about how models represent physical systems and how they can act as sources of mediated knowledge I want to contrast my views with Cartwright’s account of representational and interpretive models as outlined in her paper “Models and the limits of theory: quantum Hamiltonians and the BCS model of superconductivity”(1999). My disagreements with her centre on the lack of a specific role for representative models in her account of the development of the BCS theory of superconductivity. Part of my goal is to point out how the details buried in the BCS paper can be put to work to highlight the significance of representative models for the process of theory construction and how these models function as mediators and hence sources of mediated knowledge. I begin with a short description of Cartwright’s views on this issue, my criticisms of it and follow with a discussion of how I want to approach the issues of representation and mediation and why representation is crucial for our understanding of how scientific models deliver information.

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Paul Teller, "The Finewright Theory"

    This essay explores a certain confluence between the views of Nancy Cartwright and Arthur Fine. According to Fine’s “Natural Ontological Attitude” we should rest content with the “core position” that accepts the results of scientific investigations as true on a par with more homely truths. We should resist any temptation to add either the realists’ correspondence understanding of the results of science or any of the various anti-realists’ alternative ways of understanding truth. But how are we to accept the deliverances of science as truths if, as Cartwright observes, the theoretical deliverances of science are caricatures, fictions, simulacra and lies? The essay suggests a resolution of this apparent conflict. Since “direct access” is, logically, not an option, the best to which a scientific realist could aspire is exact representations, that is, representations that cannot be further refined. Cartwright points out that we don’t have – and don’t need – any such thing. So, in rejecting the need for an addition to the core position, Fine is naturally reinterpreted as rejecting the need for exact representations, now in accord with Cartwright. But this conclusion shows that we need to rethink our understanding of truth along lines that apply equally to analog representations and show that the whole subject is intimately connected with issues surrounding vagueness The remainder of the essay offers a preliminary examination of the ways in which the FineWright theory shows that we need to rethink “truth” as an evaluation of our representations and rethink the connections between truth and the ways in which vague statements function as representations.

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Mauricio Suarez, "How Inference to the Most Probable Cause is Sound"

    This paper provides a new defence of the view about science known as “entity” or “experimental” realism. In chapters 4 and 5 of How the Laws of Physics Lie Nancy Cartwright argued that inference to the most likely cause is a success term: a putative explanation of a phenomenon by means of its most likely cause is only a genuine explanation if the cause is real. By contrast, inference to the best theoretical explanation, or explanation by subsumption under a theory is, according to Cartwright, not a success term: a theory may provide a good explanation of a phenomenon regardless of its truth-value. I defend Cartwright’s argument against the objections that have been raised against it. In particular I review Christopher Hitchcock’s detailed critique of Cartwright’s argument, and I argue that it ultimately fails – since it assumes that inference to the most likely cause is a subspecies of inference to the best theoretical explanation.

On a purely epistemic version of experimental realism, manipulation affords a particularly robust kind of causal warrant – which like any other warrant is defeasible. Hence, I contend, the evidence that we may ever have in hand in favour of a causal explanation does not logically entail the reality of the cause cited – it merely makes it more likely. But this is just what it takes to show that an inference to the most likely cause is capable of transmitting warrant. I conclude that this epistemic version of experimental realism is coherent, adequate, and a plausible epistemology for science.
 

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Ronald N. Giere, "Models, Metaphysics, and Methodology"

    Nancy Cartwright is prominent among philosophers of science who emphasize the importance of models in scientific theorizing. Beyond this basic agreement there are major differences, for example, as to exactly what roles models play in science, how models are related to theories, and even as to what models are. Unique to Cartwright is the doctrine that what are usually taken to be the laws comprising high level theories are not to be understood as generalizations about objects in the world. Rather, they describe capacities which may be exhibited in many different circumstances represented by various models. For Cartwright, capacities inhere in things; they are features of the world. This raises the question whether an appeal to capacities can be justified within a scientific philosophy of science. Are they, perhaps, too metaphysical? Could the agreed roles for models be better grounded in pragmatically justified methodological prescriptions? 

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Carl Hoefer, "For Fundamentalism"

    In this paper I defend fundamental physical laws from the arguments mounted by Nancy Cartwright in her (1999) book The Dappled World (and other publications). Cartwright’s first book How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) argued for the literal falsity of many of the so-called fundamental laws in physics texts, in their intended applications. Her more recent thrust has been against the presumption that the successes of such laws in their intended application (supposing, for the sake of argument, that the laws are ‘true’ there) provides grounds for holding the laws to be true outside the domain of these successes. For Cartwright, all the laws we have found to date are true – to the extent they are ever true at all – only inside systems that mirror the standard models of physical theories.
In a single paper one cannot hope to confront all the wide-ranging arguments that support Cartwright’s anti-fundamentalist stance. My aim is more modest: I hope to state clearly some of the grounds that one may cite in favour of fundamental laws, and to respond to part of Cartwright’s more recent anti-fundamentalist work. I will argue, positively, that we have a good deal of evidence for mathematical laws – not just causal capacities, whether mathematical or not – underlying many natural phenomena. I will also argue, negatively, that the main thrust of Cartwright’s recent arguments unfairly demands that a fundamentalist be a strong reductionist.
 

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Michael Esfeld, "Cartwright's Wholism"

    This paper proposes a critical examination of the wholism that Cartwright contemplates. The first part spells out the consequences of this position – notably our principled ignorance of nature as a whole. The second part considers that physical theory which is widely claimed to exhibit some sort of wholism, namely quantum physics. I sketch a wholistic model of quantum physics and compare this model to the wholism that Cartwright considers. The result is that – contrary to what Cartwright suggests – we do not have to see ourselves as being ignorant of nature as such and our scientific view of nature can be quite systematic instead of being a patchwork. Finally, Cartwright’s wholism is confronted with confirmation wholism and semantic wholism. The result is again that these sorts of wholism speak against a patchwork view of our knowledge.

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James Woodward, "Invariance, Modularity, and All That: Cartwright on Causation"

    This paper will focus on recent work by Nancy Cartwright concerning the interpretation of systems of structural equations and her criticisms of the “interventionist” account of such systems that I and a number of other writers have advocated. Central to such accounts is a condition that Dan Hausman and I call modularity: when a system of equations accurately and completely represents a set of causal relationships each equation should correspond to a distinct causal mechanism and each equation should be such that it is possible in principle to disrupt it without interfering with any of the other equations in the system. Cartwright has criticized this condition in a number of recent papers. She maintains that it is not the "job" of a set of equations to tell us what would happen if one of them were disrupted. She also objects more generally to any attempt to interpret causal claims as claims about what would happen under interventions, contending that we should think of the connection with interventions as test for causality that is sometimes but not always applicable rather than as an account of causality. In addition, Cartwright advances a different notion of intervention from the notion that I advocate. The larger background to all of this is Cartwright's sympathy for a pluralistic, multi-criterial approach to causation and her rejection of mono-criterial accounts such as the interventionist interpretation. This paper provides a restatement and defense of the modularity condition and the interventionist interpretation of causation against Cartwright's criticisms. It will also explore various notions of intervention, including Cartwright's, with an eye to understanding their advantages and disadvantages.

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Iain Martel, "The Principle of the Common Cause, the Causal Markov Condition, and Quantum Mechanics"

    Nancy Cartwright has, in numerous papers, argued against the probabilistic condition known as the Causal Markov Condition. She has also, again in numerous papers, argued that it is only a misguided commitment to the sort of condition embodied in the Causal Markov Condition that leads philosophers to deny the possibility of a causal account of the kind of distant correlations in quantum mechanics revealed in EPR experiment. In this paper, I will argue that Cartwright is largely right about the inapplicability of the Causal Markov Condition in many of the contexts in which it is invoked. However, I wish to defend the Causal Markov Condition precisely as it applies to our description of the world at the level of fundamental physics; that is, in particular, in the domain of quantum mechanics. The version of the Causal Markov Condition that I defend is one in which the notion of a Parent is generalized to models containing dense sequences of variables. In such a model, I argue, the Causal Markov Condition may be satisfied, even if it contains common causes which do not screen off the correlations between their effects; that is, even if the model contains counterexamples to Hans Reichenbach’s celebrated Principle of the Common Cause. As such counterexamples are central to Cartwright’s main arguments against the Causal Markov Condition, I conclude that Cartwright’s arguments fail in this case. Furthermore, I will show that dense, common-cause models satisfying the Causal Markov Condition can be given for the EPR experiment. In such models, the quantum state itself appears as a nonlocalized common cause. The key to the causal account of quantum mechanical correlations I provide is a requirement of causal propagation. I close by defending this requirement, arguing against Cartwright’s own, nonpropagating, common cause models for EPR. 

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Julian Reiss, "Beyond Capacities" 

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Christoph Schmidt-Petri, "Cartwright and Mill on capacities and tendencies" 

   This paper examines the relation between Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and Mill's concept of 'tendencies' and argues that they are not equivalent. Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and her motivation to adopt it as a central notion in her philosophy of science are described. It is argued that the Millian concept of 'tendencies' is distinct because Mill restricts its use to a set of special cases. These are the cases in which causes combine 'mechanically'. Hence for Mill 'tendencies' do not merely describe the operation of causes, but also and perhaps even primarily how they combine. This does not hold of Cartwrightian capacities which are meant to have unlimited applicability. Mill also explicitly denies the realism of 'capacities' in a sense which overlaps with Cartwright's. Her attempt to derive empirist credentials for her notion of capacity from Mill is therefore unsuccessful. 

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Brigitte Falkenburg, "How Classical and Quantum States Relate: Cartwright on the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics"

    Cartwright’s views of quantum theory have changed twice. In 1983 Cartwright criticized her early fundamentalism of quantum theory and defended a much weaker realism of quantum states and processes. At that time she still hoped for a quantum statistical mechanics that might embrace both the internal dynamics of a quantum system and the reduction of the wave packet. Today, she defends a disunified view of quantum physics and suggests to ascribe to a system a quantum and a classical state at once. This is a step back from defending a quantum theory of measurement to a quantum philosophy that follows Bohr’s line of reasoning. In the following, I investigate how Cartwright’s positions of 1983 and 1999 relate to each other and to quantum physics. I look at her 1983 paper on the measurement problem and discuss her arguments in favour of quantum statistical mechanics. In contradistinction to these arguments, the semi-classical approach to the superposition problem defended in The Dappled World is very modest. I show that the semi-classical approach is justified because in defending her earlier position, we run into a logical dilemma. The first horn is idealism, the second is some version of a disunified physics.

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Stathis Psillos, "Cartwright's Realist Toil: From Entities to Capacities"

    This paper attempts a systematic critical examination of Nancy Cartwright’s realism, which has been called “entity realism”. Cartwright has contrasted her commitment to entities to her denial of “theoretical laws”. In sections 2 and 3, I examine in some detail the grounds on which Cartwright drew this contrast, and find them wanting. In section 3, I claim that the method Cartwright articulated, Inference to the Most Likely Cause, is important but incomplete. Specifically, I claim that there is a more exciting method that Cartwright herself describes as Inference to the Best Cause, which, however, is a species of Inference to the Best Explanation. But Cartwright has been against Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). So in section 4 I try to challenge Cartwright’s central argument against IBE. Finally, in section 5 I discuss in some detail Cartwright’s central non-Humean concept, viz., capacities. Cartwright is a strong realist about capacities: they are the fundamental building blocks of her metaphysics. But there are a number of problems with capacities. Though we can easily see how attractive it is to be a realist about capacities, I think it’s really hard to be one. So, though Humeanism is certainly independent of scientific realism, I shall argue that we have not been given compelling reasons for a non-Humean metaphysics of capacities.

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Alfred Nordmann, "“Getting the Causal Story Right” – Hermeneutic Moments in Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science"


    According to Nancy Cartwright, the truth doesn't explain much, nor is there a general account of how theories relate to phenomena. Instead, scientific explanation proceeds in a piecemeal manner as models fit out theories and phenomena are fitted to the models. Cartwright thus produces an account of how models on the one hand measure, read, or disclose nature's capacities, and on the other hand interpret theory and assign meaning to concepts like “force” or “work.” Accordingly, Cartwright's investigation involves three classically “hermeneutic” settings. In How the Laws of Physics Lie she considers physics as theatre, in Nature's Capacities and their Measurement she “reads” the Schrödinger equation as Leszek Nowak reads Marx's Das Kapital, and in The Dappled World she likens models to fables. Cartwright thereby succeeds where traditional hermeneutic accounts of science have failed, namely in making sense of science as a hermeneutic process which discloses world and reader to each other. As opposed to traditional philosophy of science, she does not provide formal reconstructions of causal stories but asks just what it takes to get the causal story right in the first place. Instead of taking as her paradigm of science just those cases where scientists traverse easily and successfully between abstract theories and concrete phenomena, she shows how these are the very special cases that are the hardest to understand. Similarly, she presupposes neither the impersonal knowing subject of science nor the literalness of scientific language but shows how these only emerge from a hermeneutic process.

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