Nancy Cartwright

From Philosopedia.org

Nancy Cartwright (d/m/1943)

An American-born philosopher, Cartwright studied mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh and graduated summa cum laude in 1966. Her 1971 doctoral thesis at the University of Illinois at Chicago was entitled "Philosophical Analysis of the Concept of Mixture in Quantum Mechanics."

Positions Held

From 1971 to 1973 she was an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland, and from 1973 to 1991 she worked in the Philosophy Department at Stanford University.

Her visiting appointments included the University of California, Los Angeles; Princeton; Pittsburgh; California Institute of Technology; and Oslo University

She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld, and at the Pittsburgh Center for the Philosophy of Science.

Since 1991, she has been Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics (LSE) and since 1993 the Director of the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. Since 1998, Cartwright has been Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at San Diego.

Cartwright's stated principal interests are philosophy and history of science (especially physics and economics), causal inference, and objectivity in science.

Publications

Measuring Causes: Invariance, Modularity and the Causal Markov Condition, Measurement in Physics and Economics Discussion Paper Series Monograph DP MEAS 9/00 (London: Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, 2000)

The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2000);

Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1995);

Nature's Capacities and their Measurement (Oxford University Press, 1989), co-authors: Thomas Uebel et. al.; and

How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford University Press, 1983).

Cartwright has written a variety of articles in many national and international journals [[1]].

The Philosopher

Cartwright is a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Also, she is the President of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association.

A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

According to Prof. James Bogen of Pitzer College, she

views the higher-level laws of physics as instruments of explanation and prediction which are not true, and whose predictive and explanatory value does not require them to be true. Unlike many instrumentalists, she is a realist about the causal factors mentioned by the laws - including so-called "theoretical entities" generally considered unobservable.

The phenomena that physicists try to explain, she says, are produced by interactions of non-Humean causal factors which are too numerous, whose interactions are too complicated, and whose influences differ too much from one physical setting to another for the phenomena they produce to be systematically explained or predicted without recourse to simplifications, idealizations, and unrealistic generalizations. The falsity of the laws, simplifications, and idealizations are the price physicists must pay for useful and cognitively manageable pictures of the physical universe.

Cartwright has written extensively on scientific explanation, the epistemology of science, and problems in the philosophy of quantum physics.

Cartwright, who lives in Oxford, was married to Sir Stuart Hampshire (1 October 1914 - 13 June 2004. Sir Stuart was a philosopher and reviewer who toward the end of his life worked as Warden of Wadham College Oxford and as Professor at Stanford University. They have two daughters, Emily and Sophia, and a granddaughter, Lucy.

{James Bogen, OCP}