The Dappled World

Author : Nancy Cartwright
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139936360
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dappled World written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-23 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Nancy Cartwright
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1474244084
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rethinking Order written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a radical new picture of natural order. The Newtonian idea of a cosmos ruled by universal and exceptionless laws has been superseded; replaced by a conception of nature as a realm of diverse powers, potencies, and dispositions, a 'dappled world'. There is order in nature, but it is more local, diverse, piecemeal, open, and emergent than Newton imagined. In each chapter expert authors expound the historical context of the idea of laws of nature, and explore the diverse sorts of order actually presupposed by work in physics, biology, and the social sciences. They consider how human freedom might be understood, and explore how Newton's idea of a 'universal designer' might be revised, in this new context. They argue that there is not one unified totalizing program of science, aiming at the completion of one closed causal system. We live in an ordered universe, but we need to rethink the classical idea of the 'laws of nature' in a more dynamic and creatively diverse way.

Author : Nancy Cartwright
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521644112
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Dappled World written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-23 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important and innovative collection of essays argues for a patchwork of laws of nature.

Author : Nancy Cartwright
Publisher : Open Court Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0812694724
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nature, the Artful Modeler written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Luc Bovens
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134170564
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science written by Luc Bovens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only book that addresses Cartwright's undoubted influence on the study of the philosophy of science. This critical assessment contains contributions from Cartwright's champions and critics, including leading scholars in the field such as Ronald N. Giere and Paul Teller.

Author : Nancy Cartwright
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191519901
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How the Laws of Physics Lie written by Nancy Cartwright and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1983-06-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, Nancy Cartwright argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe the regularities that exist in nature. Yet she is not `anti-realist'. Rather, she draws a novel distinction, arguing that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but that the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

Author : David Biro
Publisher : Lake Union Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781542019811
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book This Magnificent Dappled Sea written by David Biro and published by Lake Union Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two strangers--generations and oceans apart--have a chance to save each other in this moving and suspenseful novel about family secrets and the ineffable connections that attach us. In a small Northern Italian village, nine-year-old Luca Taviano catches a stubborn cold and is subsequently diagnosed with leukemia. His only hope for survival is a bone marrow transplant. After an exhaustive search, a match turns up three thousand miles away in the form of a most unlikely donor: Joseph Neiman, a rabbi in Brooklyn, New York, who is suffering from a debilitating crisis of faith. As Luca's young nurse, Nina Vocelli, risks her career and races against time to help save the spirited redheaded boy, she uncovers terrible secrets from World War II--secrets that reveal how a Catholic child could have Jewish genes. Can inheritance be transcended by accidents of love? That is the question at the heart of This Magnificent Dappled Sea, a novel that challenges the idea of identity and celebrates the ties that bind us together.

Author : Riku Onda
Publisher : Bitter Lemon Press
ISBN 13 : 1913394603
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight written by Riku Onda and published by Bitter Lemon Press. This book was released on 2022-06-23 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychological thriller by the Japanese author of the highly acclaimed The Aosawa Murders, selected by NYT as one of the most notable books of 2020. A desolate apartment, a man and a woman about to spend their last night together. Each believes the other to be a killer, and is determined to extract a confession. Two people desperate to unlock the truth. The pair’s relationship and chain of events leading up to this night are revealed in chapters that alternate between the two voices, giving different versions of the same events.

Author : Friedel Weinert
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319317083
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Demons of Science written by Friedel Weinert and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first all-encompassing exploration of the role of demons in philosophical and scientific thought experiments. In Part I, the author explains the importance of thought experiments in science and philosophy. Part II considers Laplace’s Demon, whose claim is that the world is completely deterministic. Part III introduces Maxwell’s Demon, who - by contrast - experiences a world that is probabilistic and indeterministic. Part IV explores Nietzsche’s thesis of the cyclic and eternal recurrence of events. In each case a number of philosophical consequences regarding determinism and indeterminism, the arrows of time, the nature of the mind and free will are said to follow from the Demons’s worldviews. The book investigates what these Demons - and others - can and cannot tell us about our world.

Author : Robert Hugh Benson
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.Y3/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lord of the World written by Robert Hugh Benson and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1908 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel's protagonist is a British Roman Catholic priest, Father Percy Franklin, who looks identical to the mysterious U.S. Senator Julian Felsenburgh of Vermont. The senator appears as a lone and dramatic figure promising world peace in return for blind obedience. No one quite knows who he is or where he comes from, but his voice mesmerizes. Under his leadership, war is abolished. Felsenburgh becomes the President of Europe, then of the world, by popular acclaim. Everyone is fascinated with him, yet still no one knows much about him. People are both riveted and frightened by the way he demands attention. Most follow without question. Having been a close observer of President Felsenburgh's rise, Father Franklin is called to Rome, a Hong Kong-style enclave ruled by Pope John XXVI and raised to the College of Cardinals. Meanwhile, defections among bishops and priests increase. At Cardinal Franklin's instigation, the pope abolishes the Eastern Catholic Churches and forms a new religious order, the Order of Christ Crucified. All its members, including the Pope, vow to die in the name of the faith.