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Nancy Cartwright
N. Cartwright is a Professor of Philosophy and also she is the co-Director of the Centre for Humanities engaging Science and Society at Durham University. she has specialized in philosophy and methodology of the social sciences with special attention to economics and philosophy of the natural sciences, especially physics. Also worked extensively in modelling, causal inference, causal powers, and objectivity, evidence, especially for evidence-based policy and the philosophy of social technology. -
Laws of Nature
Cartwright seeks to explain the two kinds of laws of nature: laws of association and causal law. Causal laws are statement of a consistent or invariant relationship between phenomena in which the relationship is one of causation. This contribution to science brought forth a vivid understanding of the basis problem of induction and how scientific theory can be better evaluated as truth. -
How the Laws of Physics Lie
Nancy Cartwright explains the fundamental explanatory laws at the deepest understandings of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. She describes it in her work: "Not only do the laws of physics have exceptions, they are not even true for the most part. She condenses the understanding that the micro and macroscopic levels of reality do not operate the same, so then which laws become true, and what then is reality? -
Fundamentalism vs the Patchwork of Laws
Cartwright's explain on her publication, How the Laws of Physics Lie, "I think that I was deluded about the enemy: it is not realism but fundamentalism that we need to combat". Fundamentalism being strict adherence to the basic principles of any subject or discipline. She states, "to grant that a law is true - even a law of 'basic' physics or a law about the so-called fundamental particles is far from admitting that it is universal, that it holds everywhere and governs in all domains". -
Causation: One Word, Many Things
Cartwright said that when one event or cause, has direct relation to the production of another event, process, or state. "There is a great variety of different kinds of causes and that even causes of the same kind can operate in a different way". Cartwright's view is triggered a wider scope on how events can be explained from a multitude of understandings. Her research later became a published book to restructure an understanding of empiricism.
