Abstract
Science as we know it is “dappled”. Its picture of the world is a mosaic in which different aspects of the world, different systems, are represented by narrow-scope theories or models that are largely disconnected from one another. The best explanation for this disunity in our representation of the world, Nancy Cartwright has proposed, is a disunity in the world itself: rather than being governed by a small set of strict fundamental laws, events unfold according to a patchwork of principles covering different kinds of systems or segments of reality, each with something less than full omnipotence and with the possibility of anomic indeterminism at the boundaries. This paper attempts to undercut Cartwright’s argument for a dappled world by showing that the motley nature of science, both now and even at the completion of empirical inquiry, can equally well be explained by proponents of the “fundamentalist” view that the universe’s initial conditions and fundamental physical laws determine everything that ever happens.
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Notes
- 1.
In earlier work Cartwright seemed content to argue that it is a real possibility that the world is dappled, that the nomological mosaic is a prospect worthy of serious philosophical consideration. Now, however, she is happy to talk about her “belief in the dappled world” (Cartwright 1999, p. 1).
- 2.
I am unsure whether Hoefer’s antireductionism denies the possibility of reductive unification in principle, in practice, or merely the explanatory relevance of the enterprise. At one point he writes (p. 317) “I suspect most fundamentalists have no wish to argue that such a reduction is possible, for us at least”, suggesting the intermediate view, with the delineation of the mandala perhaps blocked by complexity, but it is the last of the three possibilities that I attribute to him in the main text.
- 3.
This argument is developed at greater length in Strevens (2016).
- 4.
More exactly, what is entailed is a high physical probability for these descriptive and explanatory consequences.
- 5.
The core has some empirical content, most obviously the thesis of common ancestry. But in simple selection models, that content motivates a certain method without contributing to the method’s products—it motivates a search for models of population change driven by natural selection, but it does not appear in those models as a working part.
- 6.
It is also of interest that the transfer seems to have occurred around the time of the Agricultural Revolution.
- 7.
I should note that the sort of effectiveness that enhances virulence does not necessarily work to a parasite’s advantage. I use the term “effectiveness”, then, in a sense that is detached from biological optimality.
- 8.
Physics, II.4. Aristotle’s chance occurrences happen only to beings capable of choice (II.6), so his notion does not apply to biological happenstance. He introduces another notion, of spontaneity, that might apply, though it has a somewhat different sense than my “chance” or “happenstance”.
- 9.
- 10.
Cartwright (1999, p. 11–12). All the following page references are to the same work.
- 11.
Cartwright goes even further, writing that the fundamentalist foundations are based in “a priori metaphysics” rather than “hard scientific investigation” (p. 12)—a charge which most fundamentalists would strenuously deny. The better part of her empiricist argument seems to me to hinge on the indirectness of our evidence for the fundamentalist posits compared to the directness of our evidence for the mosaicists’s posits.
References
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Strevens, M. (2017). Dappled Science in a Unified World. In: Chao, HK., Reiss, J. (eds) Philosophy of Science in Practice. Synthese Library, vol 379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45532-7_5
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