Abstract

Cartwright’s self-proclaimed philosophical heritage includes Aristotle and Otto Neurath. Her Aristotelianism includes the view that the aim of science is the identification of the capacities of things in nature. From Neurath she takes a “patchwork” view of theories according to which theories do not fit into an unified whole in which higher-order sciences reduce, in some way, to lower-order sciences. Instead, theories work for particular kinds of phenomena and there is no guarantee that any theory will work outside of those situations for which it was constructed. Cartwright maintains that theories and laws may provide true descriptions of the world, but no one theory or set of laws is universal. She argues that, since laws and theories are not universal, all laws are ceteris paribus. The achievement of science does not rest on knowledge of laws, but knowledge of the capacities that the things in the world possess.