Big Systems Versus Stocky Tangles: It Can Matter to the Details

Cartwright, N.

Abstract

Wolfgang Spohn’s Frege prize lecture, like the work on which it is based, is a tour de force of rich, elegant, coherent argument about how the projected world that we experience is constructed. But we do not live in this projected world nor reason about it. The things Spohn constructs are there from the start—or so my Stanford School pragmatism teaches. This paper explores a deep difference in philosophical approaches—Spohn’s elegant proofs versus the stocky, tangled arguments I advocate—and illustrates how these play out in far more detailed disputes about the nature of causality and causal inference.

Citation

Cartwright, N. (2018). Big Systems Versus Stocky Tangles: It Can Matter to the Details. Erkenntnis, 83(1), 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9869-8

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 18, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jan 19, 2017
• Publication Date: Feb 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jan 24, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 25, 2017
• Journal: Erkenntnis
• Print ISSN: 0165-0106
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-8420
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 83
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 3-19
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9869-8
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1366647