Template:M intro design Nomological machine: Difference between revisions

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 As a piece of marketing, this is a ''terrible'', obscurant — if technically accurate — label.<ref>Like academics, lawyers learn to use the arcane vocabulary of the [[power structure]] while on the bottom rungs of the profession as a means of climbing up it: it is a credentialing strategy and part of the tribal identification ritual. By the time they get high enough to influence how the upcoming generations write, they have often forgotten how to write clearly and simply themselves. Cartwright is a brilliant thinker, but her writing is dense and academic.</ref> A better name would be “regularity machine” or even just a ''model'': a device designed to generate ''regularities'' predicted by the theory by filtering out the inconvenient chattering, debris and crosstalk we get in real life, to extract the pure, untrammelled outcomes your theory predicts.
-A “nomological machine” is carefully designed, constrained, hermetically-sealed, hypothetical [[simple system]] designed to generate the specific outcome an existing theory predicts. It is not a means of proving a theory so much as ''articulating'' it.
+A “nomological machine” is a hermetically-sealed [[simple system]], carefully designed to generate the specific outcome a scientific theory predicts. It is not a means of proving the theory so much as ''articulating'' it.
 So, for example, take Newton’s second law of motion, ''F=ma''. The ''force'' (F) acting on an object is equal to its ''mass'' (m)  times its ''[[acceleration]]'' (a).
-If we apply a force of one Newton to a one kilogramme ball it will accelerate at 1 metre per second squared.
+The nomological machine might be something like this: a perfectly elastic one kilogramme ball, in a frictionless vacuum, to which we apply a force of one Newton, which therefore accelerates at 1 metre per second squared.
-This is an immutable law of physics.<ref>For all non-relativistic, non-quantum scales.</ref> But the conditions in which it holds — zero friction, perfect elasticity, a non-inertial frame of reference — never prevail in “the field”. In life, there is always friction — I mean, tell me about it — heat, wind, impurity and inexactitude. We can never  be sure of our measurements — was it ''exactly'' a Newton? — whether the force was applied perfectly flush, nor whether the speedo was correctly calibrated. We we expect the prediction to be “near enough” but don’t expect accuracy to the micrometre.  It is too hard to calculate, and we don’t have the data in any case.
+The conditions in which this machine operates — zero friction, perfect elasticity, a non-inertial frame of reference — never prevail “in the wild”. In life, there is always friction, interference and inexactitude. We can never  be sure of our measurements — was it ''exactly'' a Newton? — whether the force was applied perfectly flush, nor whether the speedo was correctly calibrated. We we expect the prediction to be “near enough” but don’t expect accuracy to the micrometre.  It is too hard to calculate, and we don’t have the data in any case.
 Newton’s neat formula, with all these unrealistic conditions, is a ''nomological machine''. If the observed universe does not seem to quite come up to brief, we blame shortcomings in our observations and the lack of conditions required to satisfy the model. The nomological machine is not properly represented.