Nancy Cartwright - Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better

Nature, the Artful Modeler

THE PAUL CARUS LECTURES

PUBLISHED IN MEMORY OF

PAUL CARUS

18521919

EDITOR OF

THE OPEN COURT

AND

THE MONIST

FROM

1888 TO 1919

THE PAUL CARUS LECTURE SERIES 23

Nature, the Artful Modeler

Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better

Nancy Cartwright

OPEN COURT
Chicago

THE PAUL CARUS LECTURE SERIES 23

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First printing 2019

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Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better

ISBN: 978-0-8126-9468-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930416

This book is also available as an e-book (ISBN 978-0-8126-9472-7)

These lectures are dedicated to Vivian Weil, who (in the words of John Douard) turned engineering into a profession by giving it an ethics, and on account of whom I have always wanted to be better.

Nature, the Artful Modeler: She Reads The New Yorker, Trusts in God, and Takes Short Views.

Contents

Thats why ours work so well. But she is not Kant, the grand synthesizer; Augustus Caesar, whose decrees went out to all the world; nor Boole, Frege, Russell, or Peano, doyens of deduction. Perhaps Isambard Brunel, with his dockyards, railways, and steamships; Margaret Knight, whose machines made flat-bottomed paper bags, cut shoe soles, and raised sash windows; or Alice Waters, creator of super new California cuisines.

Powers, arrangements, and causes. She manages actual possibilities, obeys the Barcan formula, and does not sit down with counterfactuals.

Picking up where Nature leaves off, building it better, and warranting your work.

Richard Vagnino

Nancy Cartwright and Pedro Merlussi

Preface: Whats Here?

This book contains my three 2017 Carus lectures (), plus four further papers that develop and support the central theses of the Carus lectures: that a very great deal of our important scientific knowledge is knowledge-how not knowledge-that; that, concomitantly, many of our most useful principles (including high-level laws of physics) are neither true nor false but are rather (in the words of Pierre Duhem) symbolic representations that we use to model, predict, and navigate the world; that a good many of these symbolic representations are short-hand labels for powers and our practices for using them; that our scientific successes do not suggest that Nature operates by law in fixing what happens; rather the world is full of possibilities and what happens is best recouped by artful modeling.

defend my claims that possibilities are real. This is of course a huge philosophical issue. I stick to the philosophy of science side of it, in dialogue with two giants in philosophy of science, both great defenders of the opposing view that possibility, indeed all modality, is only in the modelin our representations of the worldand not in the world itself: Wolfgang Spohn and Bas van Fraassen. The discussion with Spohn was in celebration in 2015 of his Frege Prize and with van Fraassen at a special event organized for this purpose by the Philosophy Department at UC Davis and the (San Francisco) Bay Area Philosophy of Science group in 2018.

The theme of modality with respect to the laws of nature is pursued in depth in the joint work with Pedro Merlussi in it seems as if these issues are for the most part orthogonal to what a law is taken to be. In particular, contrary to a common expectation, accounts that focus on powers do not fit or fail to fit with contingency any more readily than the other accounts.

My third Carus lecture develops this theme further, in particular looking at how the moral and the natural order interweave when different concepts of causality support different loci for blame and responsibility. This chapter first appeared in a volume in honor of the historian of science Lorraine Daston. It was inspired by her brilliant and imaginative Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard University in 2002, The Moral Authority of Nature.

NANCY CARTWRIGHT

January 2019

Acknowledgments

The thinking behind these lectures and the additional papers included here has been influenced by myriad conversations and work with students, teachers, colleagues, friends, and adversaries over decades. I would like to thank them all for the immense help they have been. It has also been supported by the universities at which I have worked and visited and by a number of generous grants from private and public bodies, for which I am also extremely grateful.

Besides Durham University and the University of California at San Diego, work for this book was supported by the Templeton-funded LSE/UCSD project, Gods Order, Mans Order and the Order of Nature and by the Durham project Knowledge for Use (K4U), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 667526 K4U). The content reflects only the authors view and the ERC is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

The epigraph is a reference to W. H. Audens Hermetic Decalogue (from Under Which Lyre). I hope that my work here can be excused for committing a social science.

(design for Millikans experiment) is reprinted with permission from Allan Franklin, Millikans Oil-Drop Experiments, Chem. Educator 2, no. 1 (1997). Copyright 2019 by the American Physical Society.

(photo of Millikans apparatus) is reprinted courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology.

(Nature Conservancy model for a marine reserve) is reprinted with permission from: TNC, 2007. Conservation Action Planning Handbook: Developing Strategies, Taking Action and Measuring Success at Any Scale. The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA.

Figure 3.2 is reprinted from What Works in Conservation, W. J. Sutherland, L.V. Dicks, N. Ockendon, and R. K. Smith (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0060

, Big Systems versus Stocky Tangles: It Can Matter to the Details is reprinted from Erkenntnis 2017.

, Are Laws of Nature Consistent with Contingency?, N. Cartwright and P. Merlussi, originally appeared in