It is often supposed that the spectacular successes of our modern mathematical sciences support a lofty vision of a world completely ordered by one single elegant theory. In this book Nancy Cartwright argues to the contrary. When we draw our image of the world from the way modern science works - as empiricism teaches us we should - we end up with a world where some features are precisely ordered, others are given to rough regularity and still (...) others behave in their own diverse ways. This patchwork makes sense when we realise that laws are very special productions of nature, requiring very special arrangements for their generation. Combining classic and newly written essays on physics and economics, The Dappled World carries important philosophical consequences and offers serious lessons for both the natural and the social sciences. (shrink)

The challenge of The Dappled World is to filter out its more unqualified slogans, and to expose thereby a genuinely provocative and highly intuitive, potentially compelling picture of the world and various sciences which attempt to map it. One could be forgiven for failing to engage with this picture, for it is overshadowed by the rhetoric of more strident claims. After successful filtration, however, several of the core ideas are revealed as issuing an account of subjects of (...) great importance to both philosophers of science and metaphysicians: the nature of laws, and the importance of dispositional properties, or ‘capacities’. (shrink)

Cartwright’s self-proclaimed philosophical heritage includes Aristotle and Otto Neurath. Her Aristotelianism includes the view that the aim of science is the identification of the capacities of things in nature. From Neurath she takes a “patchwork” view of theories according to which theories do not fit into an unified whole in which higher-order sciences reduce, in some way, to lower-order sciences. Instead, theories work for particular kinds of phenomena and there is no guarantee that any theory will work outside of those (...) situations for which it was constructed. Cartwright maintains that theories and laws may provide true descriptions of the world, but no one theory or set of laws is universal. She argues that, since laws and theories are not universal, all laws are ceteris paribus. The achievement of science does not rest on knowledge of laws, but knowledge of the capacities that the things in the world possess. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the claim that any physical theory will have an extremely limited domain of application because 1) we have to use distinct theories to model different situations in the world and 2) no theory has enough textbook models to handle anything beyond a highly simplified situation. Against the first claim, I show that many examples used to bolster it are actually instances of application of the very same classical theory rather than disjoint theories. Thus, there (...) is a hidden unity to the world of classical physics that is usually overlooked (by, for example, Nancy Cartwright who argues for the claims above). Against the second claim, I show that the practice of classical physics involves an enormous (infinite) number of models the use of which cannot be written off as merely ad hoc. Thus, although classical physics cannot, of course, model every situation in nature, it has a much larger domain than some would have us believe. (shrink)

Science as we know it is “dappled”. Its picture of the world is a mosaic in which different aspects of the world, different systems, are represented by narrow-scope theories or models that are largely disconnected from one another. The best explanation for this disunity in our representation of the world, Nancy Cartwright has proposed, is a disunity in the world itself: rather than being governed by a small set of strict fundamental laws, events unfold according (...) to a patchwork of principles covering different kinds of systems or segments of reality, each with something less than full omnipotence and with the possibility of anomic indeterminism at the boundaries. This paper attempts to undercut Cartwright’s argument for a dappled world by showing that the motley nature of science, both now and even at the completion of empirical inquiry, can equally well be explained by proponents of the “fundamentalist” view that the universe’s initial conditions and fundamental physical laws determine everything that ever happens. (shrink)

It has been argued, most trenchantly by Nancy Cartwright, that the diversity of the concepts and regularities we actually use to describe nature and predict and explain its behavior leaves us with no reason to believe that our foundational physical theories actually "apply" outside of delicately contrived systems within the laboratory. This paper argues that, diversity of method notwithstanding, there is indeed good reason to think that the foundational laws of physics are universal in their scope.

This essay endorses the conclusion of Sklar’s “Dappled Theories in a Uniform World” that he announces in his abstract, that notwithstanding recent attacks foundational theories are universal in their scope. But Sklar’s rejection of a “pluralist ontology” is questioned. It is concluded that so called “foundational” and “phenomenological” theories are on a much more equal footing as sources of knowledge than Sklar would allow, that “giving an ontology” generally involves dealing in idealizations, and that a transfigured “ficitonalism” provides (...) an (in many respects) better model of scientific knowledge than the model of “foundational truths.”. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright's charge against horizontal reductionism leads to a claim about how the world is, namely "dappled." By proposing a simple thought-experiment, I show that Cartwright's division of the world into "nomological" machines and "messy" systems for which no law applies is meaningless. The thought-experiment shows that for a system, having the property of being a nomological machine depends on what kind of questions you ask about it. No metaphysical conclusion about the world being unruly or (...) not can be drawn from a division that is question-dependent. Moreover, I argue that this predicament undermines Cartwright's attempt to provide an illustration of how bad metaphysics of science translates into bad scientific methodologies and policies. (shrink)

When the world reveals a part of its beauty, what should our reaction be? How can we respond adequately? Is not our initial reaction one of a “discrepancy between our impressions and their habitual expression?” It is this question that Proust poses in one of the crucial passages early on in his masterpiece. Describing his walks along Méséglise's Way, and “the humble discoveries” he made there, the narrator details for us the overwhelming, decisive impression made on him by a (...) shaft of sunlight:After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had struggled cheerfully, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, beside a little hut with a tiled roof in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept his tools, the sun had just reappeared, and its golden rays, washed clean by the shower, glittered anew in the sky, on the trees, on the wall of the hut and the still wet tiles of the roof, on the ridge of which a hen was strutting. The wind tugged at the wild grass growing from cracks in the wall and at the hen's downy feathers, which floated out horizontally to their full extent with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless things. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, translucent again in the sunlight, a dappled pink reflection which I had never observed before. And, seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried out aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!” But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture. (shrink)

In All Kinds of Magic, Piers recounts this voyage of re-enchantment, which led him from snow-blanketed villages in the Himalayas to a dappled, ancient Sufi ...

Adi Da argues that no solutions currently proposed are sufficient to righten the present unsustainable trajectory of life on Earth, because there is no integrated approach to the ordering of society and use of the planet. The presumption of separateness—manifesting collectively as separate “tribes” vying for control—characterizes human affairs, rather than the prior (“a priori”) unity of existence. The struggle for dominance is the “stave in the wheels” of the Earth-system's inherent capacity to self-correct. A new institution, “the Global Cooperative (...) Forum,” is proposed—invoked by “everybody-all-at-once” (a global populace awakened as a single force, capable of cooperatively effecting global change). (shrink)

orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and so called "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflec tion in which all the above-mentioned work has either its (...) core or its source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it), uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by philosophers (e. g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the youngergenerationofphilosophers today. (shrink)

Wild Ideas is a collection of essays that brings a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the center of our civilization.

This collection is the final volume of a four book survey of the state of phenomenology fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl. Its publication represents a landmark in the comprehensive treatment of contemporary phenomenology in all its vastness and richness. The diversity of the issues raised here is dazzling, but the main themes of Husserl's thought are all either explicitly treated, or else they underlie the ingenious approaches found here. Time, historicity, intentionality, eidos, meaning, possibility/reality, and teleology are (...) the main concerns of this collection devoted to studies in aesthetics, metaphysics and literary interpretation, written by such authors as, among others, R. Cobb-Stevens, C. Moreno Marquez, J. Swiecimski, Sitansu Ray and M. Kronegger. These original studies of phenomenological aesthetics and literary theory by scholars from all parts of the world were gathered by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learn ing during the year 1988/89 during its assessment of the phenomeno logical movement, fifty years after Husserl's death. IX A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXVII, ix. (shrink)

Cartwright (Synthese 121(1/2):3–27, 1999a; The dappled world, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999b) attacked the view that causal relations conform to the Markov condition by providing a counterexample in which a common cause does not screen off its effects: the prominent chemical factory. In this paper we suggest a new way to handle counterexamples to Markov causation such as the chemical factory. We argue that Cartwright’s as well as similar scenarios feature a certain kind of non-causal dependence that kicks (...) in once the common cause occurs. We then develop a representation of this specific kind of non-causal dependence that allows for modeling the problematic scenarios in such a way that the Markov condition is not violated anymore. (shrink)