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Template:M intro design Nomological machine: Difference between revisions
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“... 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>}} | “... 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 would predict if the cussedly intractable impurities | 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 planet’s cussedly intractable ''impurities'' didn’t get in the way. | ||
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. | 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. | ||