I present an interpretation of Schopenhauer's metaphysics that moderates between the positions of the advocates and critics of the standard view andthe standard objection. I contend that there are two senses of "thing-initself' in Schopenhauer's philosophy. I agree with the advocates of the standard view that the will is thing-in-itself, but only in a relative sense, i.e., the will is the thing-in-itself relative to other appearances. But I agree with the critics of the standard objection and deny that Schopenhauer's metaphysics (...) is open to the standard objection. (shrink)

This collects some of the remarks made at the 2016 Pacific APA Memorial session for Patrick Suppes and Jaakko Hintikka. The full list of speakers on behalf of these two philosophers: Dagfinn Follesdal; Dana Scott; Nancy Cartwright; Paul Humphreys; Juliet Floyd; Gabriel Sandu; John Symons.

Human awareness of natural beauty stimulates the formation of environmental ethics. I build from the insights of Jonathan Edwards, the American Puritan theologian. The experience of beauty creates and sustains relationships. Natural beauty is an aspect of that which holds things together, supporting life and individuation. Beauty joins experience to ethics. We experience beauty intuitively: it is an affecting experience which motivates thought and action. The experience of beauty gives us a stake in the existence of the beautiful. Ecology can (...) explore the relationships of natural beauty scientifically: it may be a science of the beauty of the Earth. The beauty of the world is necessary to its survival. Beauty is manifest in the interplay of interdependence with individuality, yielding diversity. The most beautiful relationships are those which recognize diversity, support individuality, and empathetically span the distinctions between beings. The sense of beauty is not a luxury, but a distinctive human vocation. (shrink)

Human awareness of natural beauty stimulates the formation of environmental ethics. I build from the insights of Jonathan Edwards, the American Puritan theologian. The experience of beauty creates and sustains relationships. Natural beauty is an aspect of that which holds things together, supporting life and individuation. Beauty joins experience to ethics. We experience beauty intuitively: it is an affecting experience which motivates thought and action. The experience of beauty gives us a stake in the existence of the beautiful. Ecology can (...) explore the relationships of natural beauty scientifically: it may be a science of the beauty of the Earth. The beauty of the world is necessary to its survival. Beauty is manifest in the interplay of interdependence with individuality, yielding diversity. The most beautiful relationships are those which recognize diversity, support individuality, and empathetically span the distinctions between beings. The sense of beauty is not a luxury, but a distinctive human vocation. (shrink)

Truly transforming the healthcare delivery and payment system turns on the ability to engage in the interoperable electronic exchange of patient health information across and beyond the care continuum. Achieving transformation requires a legal framework that supports information sharing with appropriate privacy and security protections and a trusted governance structure.

The business of cognitive therapy is to transform meanings. What better way to achieve this than through a metaphor? Metaphors straddle two different domains at once, providing a conceptual bridge from a problematic interpretation to a fresh new perspective that can cast one's experiences in a new light. Even the simplest metaphor can be used again and again with different clients, yet still achieve the desired effect. This book is the first to show just how metaphors can be used productively (...) in CBT as an integral part of the treatment. It describes the use of metaphors for a wide range of problems, including anxiety and depression, and provides countless examples of metaphors that have been used by others in CBT. It brings together in one place hundreds of metaphors that experienced therapists have used to great success. It will be a valuable sourcebook for all cognitive behaviour therapists, as well as those training in CBT. (shrink)

We are printing, by kind permission of the Law Commission, two sections of the report of the Law Commission on injuries to unborn children. This report was the result of a request to the Law Commission by the Lord Chancellor at the time (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone) to advise on `what the nature and extent of civil liability for antenatal injury should be'. The Law Commission followed its usual practice in such circumstances of consulting various bodies and obtaining expert (...) advice on the subject and then embodying the results in a working paper (Working Paper No. 47 - injuries to unborn children) published on 19 January 1973, which preceded their report (Cmnd 5709). Meanwhile a Royal Commission is considering much wider issues of civil liability for injury (including antenatal injury) but the terms of reference for the Law Commission were much narrower and confined to the position of children injured before birth. In the section relating to the present law the report makes it clear that it is probable that liability under the common law already exists. The Scottish Law Commission has also issued a report (Cmnd 5371). They were given different terms of reference and came to somewhat different conclusions. We are printing from this long report the paragraphs discussing the medical background and the summary of recommendations. As will be evident on reading the paragraphs on the medical background to injuries to the unborn child, events are moving very rapidly, particularly in the study of congenital defects and the effects of drugs but the problems of proof present great difficulty. Other causes of injury to the unborn child are better known to the general public: for example, those following the illness, infection and disease of the mother during pregnancy, injury caused in attempted termination of pregnancy and the risks resulting from the mother's condition. The summary of the recommendations sets out very clearly the legal position of the unborn child, as the Law Commission sees it, arising from injury before birth, the final conclusion being that `legislation is desirable'. These extracts from the report, apart from their intrinsic interest, lead on to the paper by Mr Kennedy and Dr Edwards in which they set out their criticisms of it, and provide quick references to the original document. (shrink)

Cartwright attempts to argue from an analysis of the composition of forces, and more generally the composition of laws, to the conclusion that laws must be regarded as false. A response to Cartwright is developed which contends that properly understood composition poses no threat to the truth of laws, even though agreeing with Cartwright that laws do not satisfy the "facticity" requirement. My analysis draws especially on the work of Creary, Bhaskar, Mill, and points towards a general (...) rejection of Cartwright's view that laws, especially fundamental laws, should be seen as false. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright is one of the most distinguished and influential contemporary philosophers of science. Despite the profound impact of her work, there is neither a systematic exposition of Cartwright’s philosophy of science nor a collection of articles that contains in-depth discussions of the major themes of her philosophy. This book is devoted to a critical assessment of Cartwright’s philosophy of science and contains contributions from Cartwright's champions and critics. Broken into three parts, the book begins by (...) addressing Cartwright's views on the practice of model building in science and the question of how models represent the world before moving on to a detailed discussion of methodologically and metaphysically challenging problems. Finally, the book addresses Cartwright's original attempts to clarify profound questions concerning the metaphysics of science. With contributions from leading scholars, such as Ronald N. Giere and Paul Teller, this unique volume will be extremely useful to philosophers of science the world over. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999) argues that (1) the fundamental laws of physics are true when and only when appropriate ceteris paribus modifiers are attached and that (2) ceteris paribus modifiers describe conditions that are almost never satisfied. She concludes that when the fundamental laws of physics are true, they don't apply in the real world, but only in highly idealized counterfactual situations. In this paper, we argue that (1) and (2) together with an assumption about contraposition entail the opposite (...) conclusion — that the fundamental laws of physics do apply in the real world. Cartwright extracts from her thesis about the inapplicability of fundamental laws the conclusion that they cannot figure in covering-law explanations. We construct a different argument for a related conclusion — that forward-directed idealized dynamical laws cannot provide covering-law explanations that are causal. This argument is neutral on whether the assumption about contraposition is true. We then discuss Cartwright's simulacrum account of explanation, which seeks to describe how idealized laws can be explanatory. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright claims that "Causality is a hot topic today both in philosophy and economics." She may be right about philosophers, but not when it comes to economists. Cartwright talks about "economics" but nothing she says about it corresponds to what is taught in economics classes. Today, economics is dominated by model builders—but not all models involve econometrics. While all model builders do respect an endogenous-exogenous distinction between variables, this distinction will not be on the basis of which (...) type of variable "causes" which, but on which variables are "determined" (and hence explained) by the model and those which are not. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright devotes half of her new book, Hunting Causes and Using Them, to critcizing "Bayes Net Methods"--as she calls them--and what she takes to be their assumptions. All of her critical claims are false or at best fractionally true. This paper reviews the literature she addresses but appears not to have met.

Cartwright argues for being a realist about theoretical entities but non-realist about theoretical laws. Her reason is that while the former involves causal explanation, the latter involves theoretical explanation; and inferences to causes, unlike inferences to theories, can avoid the redundancy objection--that one cannot rule out alternatives that explain the phenomena equally well. I sketch Cartwright's argument for inferring the most probable cause, focusing on Perrin's inference to molecular collisions as the cause of Brownian motion. I argue that (...) either the inference she describes fails to be a genuinely causal one, or else it too is open to the redundancy objection. However, I claim there is a way to sustain Cartwright's main insight: that it is possible to avoid the redundancy objection in certain cases of causal inference from experiments (e.g., Perrin). But, contrary to Cartwright, I argue that in those cases one is able to infer causes only by inferring some theoretical laws about how they produce experimental effects. (shrink)

In How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983)2 Cartwright argues for being a realist about theoretical entities but non-realist about theoretical laws. Her reason for this distinction is that only the former involves causal explanation, and accepting causal explanations commits us to the existence of the causal entity invoked. “What is special about explanation by theoretical entity is that it is causal explanation, and existence is an internal characteristic of causal claims. There is nothing similar for theoretical laws.” (p. (...) 93). For, according to Cartwright, the acceptability of a theoretical explanation is a matter of its ability to satisfy such criteria as prganizing and simplifying, and in her view, “success at organizing, predicting, and classifying is never an argument for truth.” (p. 91). In contrast, Cartwright claims, “When I infer from an effect to a cause, I am asking what made the effect occur, what brought it about. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against Nancy Cartwright's claim that we ought to abandon what she calls "fundamentalism" about the laws of nature and adopt instead her "dappled world" hypothesis. According to Cartwright we ought to abandon the notion that fundamental laws apply universally, instead we should consider the law-like statements of science to apply in highly qualified ways within narrow, non-overlapping and ontologically diverse domains, including the laws of fundamental physics. For Cartwright, "laws" are just locally (...) applicable refinements of a more open-ended concept of capacities. By providing a critique of the dappled world approach's central notion of open ended capacities and substituting this concept with an account of properties drawn from recent writing on the subject of structural realism I show that a form of fundamentalism is viable. I proceed from this conclusion to show that this form of fundamentalism provides a superior reading of case studies, such as the effective field theory program in quantum field theory, than the "dappled world" view. The case study of the EFT program demonstrates that ontological variability between theoretical domains can be accounted for without altogether abandoning fundamentalism or adopting Cartwright's more implausible theses. (shrink)

In this paper I develop five worries concerning Cartwright’s realism about entities and capacities. The first is that while she was right to insist on the ontic commitment that flows from causal explanation, she was wrong to tie these commitments solely to the entities that do the causal explaining. This move obscured the nature of causal explanation and its connection to laws. The second worry is that when she turned her attention to causal inference, by insisting on the motto (...) of ‘the most likely cause’, she underplayed her powerful argument for realism. For she focused her attention on an extrinsic feature of causal inference (or, indeed, of any ampliative inference), that is the demand of high probability, leaving behind the intrinsic qualities that causal explanation should have in order to provide the required understanding. The third worry is that her objections to Inference to the Best Explanation were unnecessarily tied to her objections about the falsity of fundamental laws. The fourth worry is that though her argument for positing capacities and being realist about them was supposed to take strength from its parallel with Sellars’s powerful argument for the indispensable explanatory role of positing unobservable entities, there are important disanalogies between the two arguments which cast doubt on the indispensability of capacities. The final (fifth) worry is that laws—perhaps brute regularities—might well have to come back from the front door, since they are still the most plausible candidates for explaining why objects have the capacities to do what they can do. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright has been a dominant figure in the philosophy of science for more than twenty years. In the early eighties she wrote her influential book "How the Laws of Physics Lie" which was generally perceived to be a challenge to a realistic conception of scientific theories. Over the last decade her focus has shifted to issues concerning what she calls "fundamentalism". This is the position that laws of nature are basic and that other things come from them. (...) class='Hi'>Cartwright rejects this story and replaces it by the view that capacities are basic and that laws obtain "on account of the repeated Operation of a system of components with stable capacities in particularly fortunate circumstances". This book focuses mainly on Cartwright's recent work on laws and capacities. It is the outcome of the second series of the Munster lectures in philosophy which took place on May 5-6, 1998. This volume comprises a revised version of Cartwright's evening talk, 12 colloquium papers which Cartwright considered to be "extremely thought provoking", followed by replies Cartwright makes to each of them. (shrink)

N. Cartwright’s results on invariance under intervention and causality (2003) are reconsidered. Procedural approach to causality elicited in this paper and contrasted with Cartwright’s apparently philosophical one unravels certain ramifications of her results. The procedural approach seems to license only a constrained notion of intervention and in consequence the “correctness to invariance” part of Cartwright’s first theorem fails for a class of cases. The converse “invariance to correctness” part of the theorem relies heavily on modeling assumptions which (...) prove to be difficult to validate in practice and are often buttressed by independently acquired evidence. (shrink)

I argue that Nancy Cartwright's largely methodological arguments for capacities and against Hume's regularity account of causation are only partially successful. They are especially problematic in establishing the primacy of singular causation and the reality of mixed-dual capacities. Therefore, her arguments need to be supported by ontological ones, and I propose the propensity interpretation of causal probabilities as a natural way of doing this.

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 (...) class='Hi'>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. (shrink)

N. Cartwright's recent results on invariance under intervention and causality (2003) are reconsidered. Procedural approach to causality elicited in this paper and contrasted with Cartwright's apparently philosophical one unravels certain ramifications of her results. The procedural approach seems to license only a constrained notion of intervention and in consequence the "correctness to invariance" part of Cartwright's first theorem fails for a class of cases. The converse "invariance to correctness" part of the theorem relies heavily on modeling assumptions (...) which prove to be difficult to validate in practice and are often buttressed by independently acquired evidence. (shrink)

The 1987 Cartwright Report into events at New Zealand’s National Women’s Hospital catalysed sweeping changes to promote and protect patients’ rights. A generation on, it is comfortable to believe that such sustained and deliberate violations of patient rights “couldn’t happen here” and “couldn’t happen now.” And yet, contemporary examples beg a different truth. Three of Cartwright’s messages hold an enduring relevance for health practitioners and patients: the need for patients to be respected as people; to be supported to (...) make informed choices; and to have their voices heard, even when they whisper. These challenges cannot be met in isolation from broader determinants of patients’ rights and will require social, technological, and cultural change in order to prevent another “unfortunate experiment.”. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel response to Nancy Cartwright’s famous argument that fundamental physical laws, such as Newton’s law of gravitation, are ceteris paribus: construing forces instrumentally allows such laws to apply generally, eliminating the need for ceteris paribus clauses. The instrumental construal of forces is motivated, and defended against prominent recent objections. Further, it is argued that such instrumentalism in no way undermines the role of force-laws in scientific practise, and indeed, is compatible with a robust realism about (...) force-laws. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the space of possible particularistic approaches to Philosophy of Science by examining the differences and similarities between Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism—as expressed in both his earlier writings (e.g., Moral Reasons , 1993), and, more explicitly defended in his book Ethics without Principles (2004)—and Nancy Cartwright’s particularism in the philosophy of science, as defended in her early collection of essays, How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), and her later book, The Dappled World: A Study (...) of the Boundaries of Science (1999). I shall argue that Dancy’s particularism is more radical, but also more plausible, than Cartwright’s, concluding that we have good reason to embrace a scientific particularism that is far closer to Dancy’s ethical particularism than any view defended by Nancy Cartwright, or any other philosopher from the ‘Stanford school’ of scientific theory. (shrink)