Template:M intro design Nomological machine: Difference between revisions

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 would predict if  the cussedly intractable impurities of real life didn’t get in the way.

The conditions in which this machine operates — zero friction, perfect elasticity, Euclidean spacetime geometry, 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.  

It is said that, when calculating trajectories during the Apollo programme, NASA scientists used Newtonian mechanics rather than Einstein’s more accurate calculations, because the relativistic maths was too hard to do on a slide rule, the effects would have been swamped by the margin for error in data observations, and it was safer and easier to make mid-course corrections in any case.<ref>This would please [[Gerd Gigerenzer]].</ref>

A rolling ball with no force upon it will eventually stop. This is, so the theory goes, only because of the corruptions of reality. So too, a [[crisp packet|crisp packet blowing this way and that across St. Mark’s square]]. Once you have discounted all the contaminating effects of the real world; the friction, convection, dust, drafts and so on — all of which are subject to their own equally scientific, equally certain laws, just in this case uncalculated — it still does, we ''assume'' obey scientific canon — but good luck proving it. For every lunar module, crisp packet, or every rolling ball, ''for every mass that ever accelerates in our imperfect human world'', we give our models the benefit of a large and practically untestable doubt. We assume that observed divergence is purely a function of lack of data and calculating wherewithal.

==== Map and territory as an immutable dualism: crossing and recrossing the threshold ====