Customer Reviews

The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science

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First of all, the congenial title belies it's in-depth content. As another reviewer noted, this book requires a pretty thorough understanding of both philosophical method and matters of science, including a grasp of quantum mechanics(not math-heavy, but having an idea of what a Hamiltonian is, for example).

Having said that, I find the book well-written, referenced, and closely argued. The author is up-front and explicitly lays out the three main theses she wishes to convey in the Introduction.

These theses, very briefly, are:
1) Empirical success of physics theories argues for their truth but not necessarily their universality.
2) Laws, where they do apply, hold only ceteris paribus.
3) Our most wide-ranging scientific knowledge is the knowledge of the nature of things, not our knowledge of laws. The former being far more generative.

Continuing from her previous book, "How the Laws of Physics Lie", the author argues that the 'laws' comprising science are not pieces of a grand unitary hierarchical schema of laws (towards the completion of which science is usually presumed to be headed), but rather that the relationship between laws is tenuous at best (hence, "Dappled" in the title). That the laws of nature are true ceteris paribus, and that their validity relies on "successful repeated operations of a nomological machine" (p. 50). A nomological machine being the selected components, capacities and situations that will repeatedly display the same behavior (the behavior that the resultant laws encode - typically with an implicit universal quantifier in front of them).

This is not anti-science or anti-realism or social constructivism. It is, however, explicitly anti-scientific-fundamentalism. The laws of science are not absolute and final, and an ideological belief in that absolutist view is misplaced. Science is a more complicated act than that and it is possible that "reality may well be just a patchwork of laws" (p. 34)

Nancy Cartwright certainly has fashioned a unique place for herself in the philosophy of science, as a mathematically and economically literate writer prepared to write books with titles like How the Laws of Physics Lie - not exactly from the Carl Sagan playbook, after all. However, despite certain allegations to the contrary, this is not wooly headed postmodernism but technical, analytical philosophy and as such suffers less, not more, than usual from allegations of academic irrelevance: Cartwright knows her maths and her economics, and she can talk turkey. Boy can she talk turkey.

Which (certainly to the extent this book purports to be aimed at the popular market, and probably even where it doesn't) is a large part of the problem. Perhaps in feeling the need to prove her credentials, Cartwright not only chooses highly arcane, technical and therefore, to readers like me, obscure examples, but then expounds them in mind-numbing, greek-alphabet fetishising, detail. The level of assumed knowledge to follow the worked examples in physics and econometrics is too high certainly for the mass market, but also I suspect for many professional philosophers. While I'm not one of those, I'm read enough professional philosophy in this field to know that I ought to be able to keep up with most of it, and that a better job might have been done in keeping me along for the ride than was actually done here.

Nor is Cartwright a particularly 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 especially 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 Daniel Dennett - would have been an advantage here. Cartwright's is pretty leaden prose.

To the extent 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 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, and never seemed to re-emerge.

It is certainly true that this book is beyond my grasp and almost certainly wasn't targeted at people like me, so those with the requisite background should disregard my vote and look into this book, but those more used to browsing the popular science section might want to steer clear.

Olly Buxton

This is a nice anthology of papers by Prof. Cartwright that includes "Aristotelian Natures and the Modern Experimental Method," a brilliant and important paper that itself is worth the price of the book. And you get introduced to other pieces of her work, from both before and after _Nature's Capacities and their Measurement._ For graduate level courses in philosophy of science, this collection makes a great place to look for readings to assign, because she can often serve as a foil to other philosophers' positions. She deftly deals with abstract technical issues in a style that can almost be curt at times. Cartwright never tries to veneer vacuity with verbosity (nothing about the hermeneutics of quantum gravity here!) 4-1/2 stars.

The marketing of this book seems aimed at people interested in science, but seems written for a close group of colleagues who can keep up with the high-end philosophy, which makes the writing incomprehensible to anyone outside of the circle. I'm guessing even if the reader is up on this information, it would be a tough slog reading. I learned almost nothing from this book. If you are up on your Philosophy 401 and also understand theoretical physics and economics, you might understand it.

This book seems to line up with this analysis , Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) "Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and give them sharp boundaries." I believe the above fits nicely with Nancy Cartwrights efforts,The Dappled World. I find the words within The Dappled World very washed and ironed,very tidy.

Since publishing her first book, "How the Laws of Physics Lie", Cartwright had travelled a long way - down. If you are familiar with Sokol's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which is a spoof on the Postmodern philosophers [published in 1996 in the Social Text], you know what I mean.
If you are not familiar with that famous hoax, you should rather read that, instead of chewing your way through Dr. Cartwright's concoction. By the way, Sokol's serious book, "Fashionable Nonsense" is well worth reading!