The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science

By R. Caldwell. 2000

708 citations recorded by the source corpus.

C a rt w r i g h t ’s latest book brings together previously published and new material into a single vo l u m e. She offe rs an important and systematic pers p e c t ive on the nature of natural laws that advances beyond her previous contribut i o n s. Her ch i e f claim is that there is no pyramid of l aw s, with the laws of p hysics as basic and all others supervenient. Instead, the wo rld is dappled, containing lots of d i ffe rent, localized domains in wh i ch there can be true law s c a p a ble of useful application. Th e re can be no great scientific systematization of e ve rything but this should not be a cause for disappointment. Her ‘bottom up’ pers p e c t ive is more practical and there is no reason why we should not find beauty in va r i e t y. She quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Subfields: Computational Theory and Mathematics, Global and Planetary Change, History and Philosophy of Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/545b3bc4fb010eb90dc169e58062dd1c50ef9a05

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In Computational Theory and Mathematics

In Global and Planetary Change

In History and Philosophy of Science

Citations in the corpus

Geography’s underworld: The military–industrial complex, mathematical modelling and the quantitative revolution (2008, background): “Pure laws and unblemished theories have only been derived in extraordinarily regulated settings, ‘‘primarily inside [various kinds of] walls . . . within which conditions can be arranged just so’’ (Cartwright, 1999, p. 2).”
Integrative Pluralism (2002, background): “Cartwright takes these epistemological features to generate a type of pluralism in science described by a “patchwork” relationship among the various theories and models we construct to explain the world (Cartwright 1994, 2000).”
An agent-based conception of models and scientific representation (2009, background): “6 This third possibility goes some way toward accommodating the views of Cartwright (1999) and Morgan and Morrison (1999).”
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (2007, neutral): “Cartwright, 1999, 1.”
Towards a coherent philosophy for modelling the environment (2002, background): “It is, again, analogous to the nomological system of Cartwright (1999) in that it is a formal definition of the capacities of the processes described in the model and within which the model constructs have validity (here, by definition).”
The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor? (2008, background): “3 In this, he broadly follows Cartwright’s position as expressed in The Dappled World (1999). The end of the adaptive landscape metaphor? 631”
Facets of uncertainty: epistemic uncertainty, non-stationarity, likelihood, hypothesis testing, and communication (2016, background): “A disinformative event in this context is one for which the observational data are inconsistent with the fundamental principles (or capacities in the sense of Cartwright 1999) that might be applied to hydrological systems and models.”
Explanation and understanding (2015, background): “One alternative argues for a “dappled world” in which there are local causal regularities and fragments, and not a global unified explanation of everything (Cartwright 1999).”
What are randomised controlled trials good for? (2009, background): “Julian Reiss and I have argued, both jointly and separately (Reiss 2007; Cartwright 1999), that the best way to evaluate effectiveness claims is by the construction of a causal model, where information about the behaviour of C in an RCT is only one small part of the information needed to construct t”