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First Book Published: How the Laws of Physics Lie
Cartwright's philosophy focuses on asking how science can achieve the success it does, and she questions the degree to which people put faith in the abstract nature of many laws. Her first publication describes how abstract laws of physics are translated to the material world in specific ways, and because these situations then prove the law, people make assumptions that the laws themselves must apply to the wider world. She asserts that there is no proof that they translate to a greater scope. -
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Citations
Cartwright, Nancy. Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better. Open Court, 2019.
Cartwright, Nancy, and Jeremy Hardie. Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Cartwright, Nancy. How the Laws of Physics Lie. Clarendon Press, 1983.
Cartwright, Nancy. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. -
The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science
Cartwright makes two strong stands in this book. She states how everything we learn from science is learned in a specific context that can't be applied universally. She also discusses that the world should be understood as constructed from things with specific capacities. These capacities are the objects' essential nature, which is expressed always and not just when interacted with. She expands that laws are more of regularities than universalities. -
Evidence-based policy: a practical guide to doing it better
As Nancy Cartwright advanced her career, her focus shifted to questioning whether our methods of scientific study apply to policy and make it more or less effective. She discusses that standard scientific practices like randomized control trials do not work in policy because they do not allow us to predict the effectiveness of policy. Her book discusses how to better use evidence from scientific studies and improve policy through the organization of the information provided. -
Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better
Cartwright continues to advance ideas in philosophy in this collection of papers which examines the way scientists interact with and study nature and how it is flawed. She states that when designing scientific studies, we combine local facts with ideas of nature to come to expectations about what will happen and while this can be useful, as can be imagining how nature works with no human interference, in reality, we should be examining how nature and humans adjust to interact with one another. -
When should we trust or criticise science?