What do you think about Nancy Cartwright's idea that "laws of nature" a strictly false?

Question

See links for more details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Cartwright_%28philosopher%29
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198247044/ref=sr_11_1/104-9016480-9403151?ie=UTF8

Keep in mind that Cartwright never claims that laws of nature are not usefull, jusrt not true.

Answer 1

I don't know much about her, but the wikipedia article did make sense. Many natural laws are highly idealized. While they are still useful, by idealizing them, we tend to ignore small discrepancies which can add up to big results. It seems similar in that sense to chaos theory. I don't know if this is what she says, but it seems to be the logical conclusion to be drawn from a criticism from the over-idealization of natural laws.

Mr_Know_It_All: I don't think that she has any real problem assuming that we cannot create such ideal situations. You may be right that she could never prove that this is the case, but that doesn't seem to be central to her argument. All she needs to maintain is that this ideal state has not yet occurred in science, and she can then criticize scientific laws as they are now. Even saying that an idealized state may be possible, her criticisms of natural laws would hold up until the point that such an idealized state occurred. Finally, I don't think that it is a terrible fallacy to make the assumption that such idealized states can never occur. It does seem to be a justified assumption to make since the matter can never be proven one way or the other until such an ideal state was brought into existence. Even then, we couldn't be entirely sure that it was in fact "ideal."

I know nothing about this, so I could be totally wrong, but its just my first impressions from the wikipedia article.

Answer 2

The Wikipedia article claims that Cartwright's argument is: "Cartwright says that this ideal law poses a problem since there will never be an ideal situation where only the force of gravity is acting on two masses."

The problem with this argument is that Cartwright assumes that there will never be such an ideal situation. She does not show how this could not ever be possible. Even though in our human experience we assume that she's right (one has to presume there's no way to empirically isolate gravity) she fails to prove that this is so, and as such, her argument is weak in my opinion.

Argument by analogy is always a fallacy, so if one has not completely read and understood her arguments (I have not) then any scientist worth his salt would have to ask why she would do such a thing.

Answer 3

I think she misunderstands what exactly a theory is, and how it is used to advance our knowledge of the world around us. By her logic, we can not use a globe to model the Earth because it does not account for every last subatomic particle present in the Earth.

BTW her opposition is only to _idealized_ laws, not laws of nature generally.

Answer 4

Wack-o trying to make a name for herself. Probably is a feminist and hates the fact that men identified the laws before she did.

Answer 5

Man, Bart Simpson is CRAZY!