Nancy Cartwright (b. 1944-)

  • Birth

    Nancy Cartwright was born on June 24th, 1944
  • Casual Laws

    Cartwright develops a theory that "there are two kinds of laws of nature: laws of association and casual laws." Laws of association are attention, repetition, and similarity. Casual laws are a consistent or invariant relationship between a phenomena where the relationship is causation.
  • How the Laws of Physics Lie

    Cartwright publishes a book explaining "fundamental explanatory laws at the deepest understandings of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. She is saying that laws of physics very commonly have exceptions, and most of the laws are not true.
    https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198247044.001.0001/acprof-9780198247043
  • Fundamentalism vs the Patchwork of Laws

    Cartwright wrote a sequel publication to How the laws of Physics Lie. In this publication she admits that she was wrong about saying realism was the issue but it was fundamentalism all along. Fundamentalism is strict adherence to the basic principles of any discipline.
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545199
  • Causation

    Cartwright worked on a project for three years about causation. To Cartwright causality means when a single event or cause, has direct relation to another event. In her publication she writes, "there is a great variety of different kinds of causes and that even causes of the same kind can operate in a different way." Here project eventually led to her publishing a book on reconstructing an understanding of empiricism.