Frontiers of Knowledge Award goes to the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright

The humanities category of the BBVA Foundation's Frontiers of Knowledge Award has gone this year to the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright.

Cartwright is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego; she is also professor of philosophy at Durham University and centennial visiting professor in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford.

The citation credits her with transforming our understanding of scientific evidence, causality and objectivity, and with building a bridge between philosophy and the actual practice of science.

How do the laws of physics lie?#

Cartwright's name is bound up with the provocative title of her book of 1983, How the Laws of Physics Lie.

The thesis is less perverse than it first appears. On Cartwright's account, the fundamental laws of physics work not because they describe the world as it is but because they are idealised models. There is no frictionless plane; there is no point mass; there is no isolated system.

These laws acquire their explanatory power not by telling the truth about how things stand, but by making complicated situations calculable. The more a law covers in general, the less truth it tells about particular facts.

What follows is the view Cartwright calls the dappled world: not a whole governed in orderly fashion by a single set of laws, but a mottled structure in which local regularities are scattered like islands.

Causality and evidence#

Cartwright's second great contribution was to connect this abstract argument directly to the domain of policy.

Over the past twenty years the evidence-based approach has come to dominate public policy: whether an intervention works should be tested, preferably by randomised controlled trials.

Cartwright accepts the value of that approach, but asks a critical question: is "it worked" the same thing as "it will work here"?

That an educational programme succeeded in a trial in Kenya does not show that the same programme will succeed in Turkey. The difference lies not in the quality of the trial but in the support factors that allow an intervention to work at all.

In Cartwright's terms, to carry a causal claim into a new context one must show that the new context also contains the necessary helping factors. A transfer made without that demonstration is a guess that looks like evidence.

The argument has been debated across a wide field, from development economics to education policy, and it has had a real effect on the design of applied research.

About the award#

The BBVA Foundation's Frontiers of Knowledge Awards are given in eight categories, of which the humanities is one. Philip Kitcher has previously received it in philosophy.

Cartwright's selection accords with the emphasis in the citation: philosophy of science is being assessed here not as commentary delivered on science from outside, but as work that intervenes in the practice of science itself.