Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)

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Nancy Cartwright
FBA FAcSS
Cartwright in 2007
Born (1944-06-24) June 24, 1944 (age 81)
Education
Alma materUniversity of Pittsburgh
University of Illinois at Chicago
Philosophical work
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic
Stanford School
Main interestsPhilosophy of science
Notable ideasEntity realism
‹ The template Infobox officeholder is being considered for merging. ›
President of the DLMPST/IUHPST
In office
2020–2023
Preceded byMenachem Magidor
Succeeded byValentin Goranko
Category:Articles with hCards

Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire FBA, FAcSS (born June 24, 1944)[2] is an American philosopher of science. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham. Currently, she is the past president of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DLMPST) of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology under the International Science Council (ISC).

Education and career

Cartwright earned her BSc from the University of Pittsburgh in mathematics and her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago (Congress Circle campus). Her thesis was on the concept of mixture in quantum mechanics. Before taking her current appointments, she taught at the University of Maryland, Stanford University and the London School of Economics. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Oslo, Princeton University, Caltech, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Cambridge and UCLA. She is currently Tsing Hua Honorary Distinguished Chair Professor at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and visiting research fellow at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. She co-founded the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) at the LSE and the Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society (CHESS) at the University of Durham.

Cartwright has mentored several students in England and the United States who have gone on to become professional philosophers of science, including Naomi Oreskes, Mauricio Suarez, Roman Frigg, Jeremy Howick, Peter Menzies, and Hasok Chang. She was also a supervisor of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a subsequent source of controversy.[3]

Cartwright was married to the philosopher Stuart Hampshire until his death in 2004. She was also previously married to the philosopher Ian Hacking. She has two daughters and two granddaughters.[4]

Philosophical work

Cartwright's approach to the philosophy of science is associated with the "Stanford School" of Patrick Suppes, John Dupré, Peter Galison and Ian Hacking. It is characterized by an emphasis on scientific practice as opposed to abstract scientific theories. Cartwright has made important contributions to debates on laws of nature, causation and causal inference, scientific models in the natural and social sciences, objectivity and the unity of science. Her recent work focuses on evidence and its use in informing policy decisions.

Carl Hoefer describes Cartwright's philosophy in the following terms:[5]

Nancy Cartwright's philosophy of science is, in her view, a form of empiricism but empiricism in the style of Neurath and Mill, rather than of Hume or Carnap. Her concerns are not with the problems of skepticism, induction, or demarcation; she is concerned with how actual science achieves the successes it does, and what sort of metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions are needed to understand that success.

Cartwright, like many working scientists themselves, takes a rather pragmatic/realist stance toward observations and interventions made by scientists and engineers and particularly toward their connections to causality: Scientists see impurities causing signal loss in a cable, and they stimulate an inverted population, causing it to lase. Given these starting points, there can be no question of a skeptical attitude toward causation, in either singular or generic form. The fundamental role (or better, roles) played by causation in scientific practice is undeniable; what Cartwright does, then, is reconfigure empiricism from the ground up based on this insight. In the reconfiguration process, many mainstays of the received view of science take a beating; especially [...] the fundamentality of laws of nature.

Honors and awards

Cartwright, c1990s

Cartwright served as the president of the Philosophy of Science Association (2009–10),[6] as vice-president (2007–08) and president (2008–09) of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association,[7] and was elected to be president of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology from 2020 to 2023.[8] She is professor emeritus at the London School of Economics. She is also Fellow of the British Academy,[9] a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[9] a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina,[9] and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.[10] She has received honorary degrees from Southern Methodist University and the University of St Andrews as well as a MacArthur Fellowship.[11]

Cartwright was the recipient of the Martin R. Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement of the Phi Beta Kappa Society 2017 (alongside Elliott Sober)[12] and was awarded the Carl Gustav Hempel Award in 2018 by the Philosophy of Science Association.[13] For 2025 she was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of "Humanities".[14]

In 2017, Cartwright was selected by the American Philosophical Association to deliver the Carus Lectures. She delivered a series entitled Nature, the Artful Modeler: She Reads the New Yorker, Trusts in God, and Takes Short Views.[15] The lectures were published in 2019 alongside additional essays under the title Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better.[16]

Selected works

Books

Articles

References

  1. ↑ "02/06/2009". In Our Time (BBC Radio 4). July 2, 2009. BBC Radio 4. Archived from the original on September 23, 2022. Retrieved January 18, 2014.
  2. ↑ Brown, Stuart (1996). Biographical dictionary of twentieth-century philosophers. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-28605-3. OCLC 38862354.
  3. ↑ "LSE insider claims Gaddafi donation was openly joked about;". The Independent. March 13, 2011. Archived from the original on June 18, 2022. Retrieved June 26, 2018.
  4. ↑ "Nancy Cartwright – Professor of Philosophy". profnancycartwright.com. December 8, 2020. Archived from the original on September 23, 2022. Retrieved April 29, 2022.
  5. ↑ Hartmann, Stephann, Hoefer, Carl and Luc Bovens (eds.) - Nancy Cartwright's Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge. 2008. p. 14.
  6. ↑ "Philosophy of Science Association – Governance". Archived from the original on July 27, 2011. Retrieved January 24, 2010.
  7. ↑ "Pacific Division Officers & Committees 2007–2008". Retrieved January 24, 2010.Category:All articles with dead external linksCategory:Articles with dead external links from April 2020Category:Articles with permanently dead external links[permanent dead link]; "Pacific Division Officers & Committees 2008–2009". Retrieved January 24, 2010.Category:All articles with dead external linksCategory:Articles with dead external links from April 2020Category:Articles with permanently dead external links[permanent dead link]
  8. ↑ "DLMPST Council 2020-2023". Archived from the original on August 11, 2019. Retrieved August 11, 2019.
  9. 1 2 3 "Nancy Cartwright". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. September 2024. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  10. ↑ "Eighty-four leading social scientists conferred as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences". Academy of Social Sciences (Press release). October 19, 2016. Archived from the original on October 25, 2016. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
  11. ↑ CV Nancy Cartwright Archived September 23, 2022, at the Wayback MachineCategory:Webarchive template wayback links; "Eighty-four leading social scientists conferred as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences". Academy of Social Sciences. October 19, 2016. Archived from the original on June 6, 2019. Retrieved August 5, 2017.
  12. ↑ Shepherd, Erin (May 1, 2017). "Prominent Philosophers Cartwright and Sober Win 2017 Lebowitz Prize". American Philosophical Association. Archived from the original on September 23, 2022. Retrieved September 23, 2022.
  13. ↑ "Hempel Award Recipients". Philosophy of Science Association. Archived from the original on September 23, 2022. Retrieved September 23, 2022. The Governing Board of the Philosophy of Science Association is pleased to announce that the recipient of the Carl Gustav Hempel Award for 2018 is Nancy Cartwright.
  14. ↑ BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2025
  15. ↑ "Carus Lectures". APA Online. American Philosophical Association. Retrieved February 13, 2024.
  16. ↑ Behe, Michael J. (March 2021). "Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better by Nancy Cartwright (review)". The Review of Metaphysics. 74 (3): 401–2. doi:10.1353/rvm.2020.0095. Retrieved February 13, 2024.
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