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The Dappled World – A Study of the Boundaries of Science: Difference between revisions
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Nor is Cartwright an elegant writer. The concepts she is asking the reader to accept are radical, and whilst I thought they were pretty clever and — for the part where I could keep up — compelling, they’re not well expounded, assuming as they do a familiarity with Cartwright’s earlier work which it really isn’t safe to assume. A greater faculty for expounding difficult concepts — such as that possessed by a {{author|Daniel Dennett}}<ref>A philosopher who otherwise suffers in comparison</ref> - would have been an advantage here. Cartwright’s is pretty leaden prose. | Nor is Cartwright an elegant writer. The concepts she is asking the reader to accept are radical, and whilst I thought they were pretty clever and — for the part where I could keep up — compelling, they’re not well expounded, assuming as they do a familiarity with Cartwright’s earlier work which it really isn’t safe to assume. A greater faculty for expounding difficult concepts — such as that possessed by a {{author|Daniel Dennett}}<ref>A philosopher who otherwise suffers in comparison</ref> - would have been an advantage here. Cartwright’s is pretty leaden prose. | ||
Where I understood it, Cartwright’s programme really interested me: to invert the usual wisdom that scientific laws drive and explain physical events in the universe, and observe that physical regularities precede and therefore drive the composition of scientific laws - the laws are convenient models for making sense of pre-existing regularities, and not vice versa - but that even this is a step too far; that in order to even observe the regularities we need to devise "[[nomological machine|nomological machines]]" — a pretty phrase, I'm sure you'll agree — which prescribe the conditions in which regularities will be observed. We should talk in terms of ''capacities'' rather than ''regularities'', though I | Where I understood it, Cartwright’s programme really interested me: to invert the usual wisdom that scientific laws drive and explain physical events in the universe, and observe that physical regularities precede and therefore drive the composition of scientific laws - the laws are convenient models for making sense of pre-existing regularities, and not vice versa - but that even this is a step too far; that in order to even observe the regularities we need to devise "[[nomological machine|nomological machines]]" — a pretty phrase, I'm sure you'll agree — which prescribe the conditions in which regularities will be observed. We should talk in terms of ''capacities'' rather than ''regularities'', though I couldn’t really derive much more insight than that, despite repeated attempts. | ||
The early chapters are just about manageable for the lay reader; after about half-way through I hit a brick wall when talk moved to the technical details of quantum theory. It never re-emerged. | The early chapters are just about manageable for the lay reader; after about half-way through I hit a brick wall when talk moved to the technical details of quantum theory. It never re-emerged. | ||