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

Cartwright, N.

doi:10.1007/s10670-016-9869-8

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

Cartwright, N.

Authors

Professor Nancy Cartwright nancy.cartwright@durham.ac.uk
Professor

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

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