Background
Cartwright, Nancy was born on January 24, 1944 in Pennsylvania, United States.
mathematician Philosopher of science
Cartwright, Nancy was born on January 24, 1944 in Pennsylvania, United States.
Universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois, Chicago.
1971 3. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Maryland. 1973-1991, Assistant then (1977) Associate, then (1983) full Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University. From 1991, Professor.
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, and Director of the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences. London School of Economics.
Cartwright is a philosopher of science who believes that the essential task of her subject is to make sense of actual scientific practice and to rationalize it convincingly. Her writings are outstanding in their presenting discussion of many examples. In her How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) she argued that physical laws are idealizations rather than descriptions of the processes that occur in nature. Consequently she denied that the laws of physics state the facts, that the models which play a central role in applied physics are literal representations of how things are. But although an anti-realist about theories, Cartwright takes a realist view about entities: there are no exactly true laws ‘making things happen’; it is electrons and other such real entities that are producing the effects. This position implies a ‘striking reversal of the empiricist tradition going back to Hume’ in which only observed regularities of succession or co-occurrence are real. Her Nature's Capacities and their Measurement (1989) develops this thesis by exploring its implications for the nature of causality in the actual world. She defends a realist view of causality, according to which causes arc rooted in the real capacities that things have, and she maintains that fundamental statements about causation are not general but singular in logical form. Thus she thinks it best to interpret ‘An aspirin has the capacity to relieve a headache’ as a modalized singularclaim: ‘An aspirin can relieve a headache’. Cartwright’s work is widely recognized as making an original and important contribution to the understanding of scientific practice. Sources: Personal communication.