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Cartwright, Capacities, and Probabilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Gürol Irzik
Gürol Irzik*
Affiliation:
Boğaziçi University
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Extract

Nancy Cartwright’s new book Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement (1989)2 attempts to achieve something remarkable: refute Hume’s most crucial theses concerning causation and let in capacities largely through methodological arguments. The two central theses of Hume which Cartwright challenges are:

  1. (1) Generic causal facts (e.g., causal laws) are reducible to regularities.

  2. (2) Singular causal facts are true in virtue of generic causal facts.

Cartwright’s arguments against (1) and (2) are methodological in the sense that she arrives at her conclusions by considering our best methods for studying the relationship between probability and causation. Cartwright rejects (1) on the grounds that if we look at the way in which probabilities are related to causal relations as expressed in her principle CC, or if we carefully study the methodology of causal modelling employed in the social, behavioral, and life sciences, we see that to get certain causal information from probabilities we must presuppose the truth of other generic causal facts.

Type
Part VII. Realism: Causes, Capacities and Mathematics
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 239 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Bogazici University Research Fund.

References

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