How fixed are the happenings in Nature and how are they fixed?
These lectures address what our scientific successes at predicting
and manipulating the world around us suggest in answer. One-very
orthodox-account teaches that the sciences offer general truths
that we combine with local facts to derive our expectations about
what will happen, either naturally or when we build a device to
design, be it a laser, a washing machine, an anti-malarial bed net,
or an auction for the airwaves. In these three 2017 Carus Lectures
Nancy Cartwright offers a different picture, one in which neither
we, nor Nature, have such nice rules to go by. Getting real
predictions about real happenings is an engineering enterprise that
makes clever use of a great variety of different kinds of
knowledge, with few real derivations in sight anywhere. It takes
artful modeling. Orthodoxy would have it that how we do it is not
reflective of how Nature does it. It is, rather, a consequence of
human epistemic limitations. That, Cartwright argues, is to put our
reasoning just back to front. We should read our image of what
Nature is like from the way our sciences work when they work best
in getting us around in it, non plump for a pre-set image of how
Nature must work to derive what an ideal science, freed of human
failings, would be like. Putting the order of inference right way
around implies that like us, Nature too is an artful modeler.
Lecture 1 is an exercise in description. It is a study of the
practices of science when the sciences intersect with the world
and, then, of what that world is most likely like given the
successes of these practices. Millikan's famous oil drop
experiment, and the range of knowledge pieced together to make it
work, are used to illustrate that events in the world do not occur
in patterns that can be properly described in so-called "laws of
nature." Nevertheless, they yield to artful modeling. Without a
huge leap of faith, that, it seems, is the most we can assume about
the happenings in Nature. Lecture 2 is an exercise in metaphysics.
How could the arrangements of happenings come to be that way? In
answer, Cartwright urges an ontology in which powers act together
in different ways depending on the arrangements they find
themselves in to produce what happens. It is a metaphysics in which
possibilia are real because powers and arrangement are
permissive-they constrain but often do not dictate outcomes (as we
see in contemporary quantum theory). Lecture 3, based on
Cartwright's work on evidence-based policy and randomized
controlled trials, is an exercise in the philosophy of social
technology: How we can put our knowledge of powers and our skills
at artful modeling to work to build more decent societies and how
we can use our knowledge and skills to evaluate when our attempts
are working. The lectures are important because: They offer an
original view on the age-old question of scientific realism in
which our knowledge is genuine, yet our scientific principles are
neither true nor false but are, rather, templates for building good
models. Powers are center-stage in metaphysics right now.
Back-reading them from the successes of scientific practice, as
Lecture 2 does, provides a new perspective on what they are and how
they function. There is a loud call nowadays to make philosophy
relevant to "real life." That's just what happens in Lecture 3,
where Cartwright applies the lesson of Lectures 1 and 2 to argue
for a serious rethink of the way that we are urged-and in some
places mandated-to use evidence to predict the outcomes of our
social policies.
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