How the Laws of Physics Lie

by Cartwright, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9780198247043
• ISBN10: 0198247044
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1983-07-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, Nancy Cartwright argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe the regularities that exist in nature. Yet she is not 'anti-realist'. Rather, she drawsa novel distinction, arguing that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but that the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Causal Laws and Effective Strategies	p. 21
The Truth Doesn't Explain Much	p. 44
Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts?	p. 54
The Reality of Causes In a World of Instrumental Laws	p. 74
When Explanation Leads to Inference	p. 87
For Phenomenological Laws	p. 100
Fitting Facts to Equations	p. 128
The Simulacrum Account of Explanation	p. 143
How the Measurement Problem Is an Artefact of the Mathematics	p. 163
Appendix; an Experiment to Test Reduction of the Wave Packet	p. 206
Author Index	p. 217
Subject Index	p. 219
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