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Introduction
Nancy Cartwright born in 1944 is a philosopher of science (not the voice actress of Bart Simpson) and is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham.
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Causal Laws and Effective Strategies
Cartwright seeks to explain "there are two kinds of laws of nature: laws of association and causal laws". Laws of association are are contiguity, repetition, attention, pleasure-pain, and similarity. 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
In one of her earliest publications, Nancy Cartwright explains "fundamental explanatory laws at the deepest understandings of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature". In her words, "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
This was Cartwright's followup to 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
Causality us when one event or cause, has direct relation to the production of another event, process, or state. Cartwright's input from her publication is, "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.
