-
Nancy Cartwright was born 24 June 1944 in Pennsylvania.
-
In 1983, Cartwright presented her radical thesis, How the Laws of Physics Lie. Within the collections of essays she argues the fact that current accepted modern laws of physics do not actually explain regularities in nature. (Encyclopedias, 2023) -
In 1989, Cartwright published Nature's Capacities and their Measurement she argues that "capacities are essential in our scientific world, and, contrary to empiricist orthodoxy, that they can meet sufficiently strict demands for testability" (Cartwright, 1989).
-
In 1999, Cartwright published her latest book, The Dappled World, A Study of the Boundaries of Science. In this book she continues to argue that fundamentalism is inaccurate. She believes "that the autonomy of theories is indicative of what there is to know about the world. The world itself does not have a unitary underlying lawlike pattern. Its nomological structure is dappled." (Encyclopedias, 2023) -
Some of Cartwright current work involves causation(causality). She believes there are "different kinds of causal relations imbedded in different kinds of systems, readily described using thick causal concepts" (Cartwright, 1970). Below is a video of Cartwright herself explaining her method of how she approaches her research and expanding on her current work on causality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZtT9J2vfps
-
In 2017, Cartwright received the Martin R. Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement of the Phi Beta Kappa Society (Weinberg, 2019).
