[ Nancy Cartwright (1989), Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 1-9. ]
■ 이 책의 주요 논제 [p. 1]
(i) 과학은 측정(measurement)이다.
(ii) 인과역량(capacities)은 측정될 수 있다.
(iii) 과학은 인과역량 없이 이해될 수 없다.
■ Cartwright’s claim about capacities [p.1]
- Capacities are real. They are a part of our scientific image of the world and cannot be eliminated from it.
- A host of laws are laws about enduring tendencies or capacities.
- The content of science is found not just in its laws but equally in its practices.
■ Cartwright’s position opposed to the tradition of Hume [p.2]
- tradition of Hume
(1) Singular causal facts are true in virtue of generic causal facts. But at the generic level causation was to disappear altogether.
(2) Generic causal facts are reducible to regularities.
- Cartwright challenges both theses.
p.2
- Cartwright maintains that Hume programme has things upside down and singular causal claims are primary.
(i) Singular causal facts are a necessary ingredient in the methods we use to establish generic causal claims.
(ii) The regularities themselves play a secondary role in establishing a causal law.
p.2
- The generic causal claims of science are not reports of regularities but rather capacity to make things happen.
e.g. ‘Aspirins relieve headaches.’
p.3
- Cartwright takes singular causes to be primary, and endorse capacities.
- But she is in sympathy with Hume’s empiricist outlook.
- Empiricists’ questions:
(a) where do we get our concepts and ideas?
(b) how should claims to empirical knowledge be judged?
- It is second question that matters for Cartwright’s projects and not the first.
p.4
p.5
- The real enemy for Kelvin was not so much metaphysics, but instead a kind of abstract and non-representational mathematics.
- ‘Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s equation.’
Maxwell’s theory gives no coherent physical picture.
That saying is meant to excuse this fact.
- Kevin called this view about mathematics ‘Nihilism’.
He wanted the hypotheses of physics to describe what reality was like.
p.5
- Each scientific hypothesis should be able to stand on its own as a description of reality.
- This is an empiricism opposed at once wholism and to the hypothetico-deductive method.
- Glymour’s bootstrap theory models the logic of testing for such an empiricism.
....
p.6
p.6
- Causal laws can be tested and causal capacities can be measured as surely as anything else that science deals with.
- Cartwright maintains that probabilities can measure causes but only in a world where capacities and their operation are already taken for granted.
p.7
- Cartwright focuses on the structures of econometrics, but not because of successes of econometrics as a science; rather because of the philosophic job it can do.
p.7
- Cartwright have assumed the current commonplace that science presupposes some notion of necessity: there is something that grounds the distinction between a genuine law and a mere accidental generalization.
- 러셀은 과학에 함수적 법칙(functional laws)만 필요하며 원인 개념은 필요 없다고 함.
- 카트라이트는 과학에 원인 뿐만 아니라 인과역량도 필요하다고 생각함.
- So Cartwright stand in opposition to covering-law theorists like Hempel and Ernest Nagel, who accept laws but reject capacities.
- Cartwright thinks that we need both.
■ 카트라이트의 최종 입장 [p. 8]
- We must admit capacities, and once we have them we can do way with laws.
- Capacities will do more for us at a smaller metaphysical price.
■ 책의 구성 [p. 8]
- 1장과 2장: 인과적 법칙은 방정식과 규칙적 연합으로 환원불가능하지만 측정될 수 있음.
- 3장: singular causes를 소개
- 4장: capacities를 소개
- In the discussion of Chapter 4, Mill plays a major role because Mill too was advocate of capacities. That sets the theme for Chapter 5.
- Chapter 5 argues that abstraction is the key to the construction of scientific theory; and converse process of concretization, to its application. Covering laws seem irrelevant to either enterprise.
- 6장: 인과역량이 중요한 구체적인 과학 사례
(2023.03.21.)
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