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Template:M intro design Nomological machine: Difference between revisions
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'''{{helvetica|Philosophy}}''': Relating to or denoting principles that resemble laws, especially ones describing brute facts of the universe: things that are not explainable by theory, but are just “so”. | '''{{helvetica|Philosophy}}''': Relating to or denoting principles that resemble laws, especially ones describing brute facts of the universe: things that are not explainable by theory, but are just “so”. | ||
Philosopher [[Nancy Cartwright]] coined the term “[[nomological machine]]” to describe the limited conditions that must prevail for scientific laws to work. | Philosopher [[Nancy Cartwright]] coined the term “[[nomological machine]]” to describe the limited conditions that must prevail for scientific laws to work. A nomological machine: | ||
{{quote| | {{quote| | ||
“... is a fixed (enough) arrangement of components, or factors, with stable (enough) capacities that in the right sort of stable (enough) environment will, with repeated operation, give rise to the kind of regular behavior that we represent in our scientific laws” <ref>{{author|Nancy Cartwright}}. {{br|The Dappled World – A Study of the Boundaries of Science}}. (Cambridge University Press, 1999)</ref>}} | |||
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. | 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. | ||