Take Advantage Of Nature, The Artful Modeler: Lectures On Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges The World And How We Can Arrange It Better Drafted By Nancy Cartwright Produced In Digital Format

I was given a copy of “Nature, the Artful Modeler” by the publisher for review, I thought I would get a scientific or technical work, I thought Id read about the various applications of the Golden Ratio in biology and architecture or copying biological designs into human products like robots and body armor, The book “Nature, the Artful Modeler” by Nancy Cartwright comes close to this in the sections where she talks about modeling ecosystems to determine what to do to reduce fox cub mortality or the design of medical studies and how to take what you learn to solve problems in healthcare.
Unfortunately, thats isnt even a third of the book,
What do I get instead What reads like a biology and ecologybased version of her earlier book “How the Laws of Physics Lie”, It feels like an argument for Chi, the mystical interconnecting force in Chinese Buddhism and Taoism, There are other sections that invoke Mother Nature as a godlike force, capable of awareness, violating the obvious laws of nature, and planning ahead, This isnt science it is pagan Mother Earth worship, And it is all wrapped in a scientific mantle while expecting to be treated as a serious scientific and philosophical text because the author invokes a number of studies and events.
Notably, the Fort McMurray fire evacuation, the Millikan experiment and ecosystems modeling to restore fox populations,
How can I say this Scientific laws of gravity are considered symbolic representations, not absolutes, Quantum theory is evoked as a mystical source of anything unknowable and something that could be tapped into to create the impossible, The author admits the law of gravity and other laws of physics are demonstrated daily while insisting there is “more”,
Then theres the elevation of systemic thinking to a point of faith, That leap of faith is that were supposed to take that allencompassing, presumably good and benevolent Mother Nature and apply that to human morality, The author explicitly states we need to apply an allencompassing system of behavior on society for our good, It is implied that this is socialist and totalitarian, because thats the only way you can affect every aspect of society and personal choices, This is presented as the only way to eliminate the root causes of various social ills, while the author denies human free will throughout the book and states at the end that both social punishments like shaming and physical ones like incarceration and spanking are unacceptable.

I wasnt expecting to read a liberal political and religious treatise that so well demonstrates who love of nature and grand systems leads to demands that we implement totalitarian systems of social control for the “greatest good” because you think that nature is so great that it should be the ideal.
Im not surprised someone who has worked for the Nature Conservancy idealizes nature while ignoring the horrors of predators and parasites, That is liberal environmentalism appropriating the Garden of Eden idea from Christianity and then saying the best way of living is neopagan socialist,
At least Doctor Jordan Peterson is honest about the JudeoChristian basis of his book “Rules for Life”, and he admits hes trying to expand it to a universal set of rules for everyone to live by.
“Nature, the Artful Modeler” pretends there are not religious/metaphysical underpinnings for its main tenets or its final recommendations to apply such “systems” to human society and politics,
books with no wikipedia pages are often either really bad or obscure or are terrifyingly difficult to read, which one was this terrifying, An interesting read detailing some of Nancy Cartwright's Neoaristotelian ideas, The book is written slightly tongueincheek with a lot of metaphors related to philosophy of science concepts that have clearly confused the other reviewers here, I'm not entirely convinced with the concept of a Nature that in some way sort of pragmatically 'fixes' itself, or in the use of the concept of powers, but the author certainly builds an interesting case that explores a different approach to interdisciplinary science interpretation.
How fixed are the happenings in Nature and how are they fixed These lectures address what our scientific successes at predicting and manipulating the world around us suggest in answer.


Onevery orthodoxaccount teaches that the sciences offer general truths that we combine with local facts to derive our expectations about what will happen, either naturally or when we build a device to design, be it a laser, a washing machine, an antimalarial bed net, or an auction for the airwaves.


In these threeCarus Lectures Nancy Cartwright offers a different picture, one in which neither we, nor Nature, have such nice rules to go by, Getting real predictions

about real happenings is an engineering enterprise that makes clever use of a great variety of different kinds of knowledge, with few real derivations in sight anywhere.
It takes artful modeling. Orthodoxy would have it that how we do it is not reflective of how Nature does it, It is, rather, a consequence of human epistemic limitations, That, Cartwright argues, is to put our reasoning just back to front, We should read our image of what Nature is like from the way our sciences work when they work best in getting us around in it, non plump for a preset image of how Nature must work to derive what an ideal science, freed of human failings, would be like.
Putting the order of inference right way around implies that like us, Nature too is an artful modeler,

Lectureis an exercise in description, It is a study of the practices of science when the sciences intersect with the world and, then, of what that world is most likely like given the successes of these practices.
Millikan's famous oil drop experiment, and the range of knowledge pieced together to make it work, are used to illustrate that events in the world do not occur in patterns that can be properly described in socalled "laws of nature.
" Nevertheless, they yield to artful modeling, Without a huge leap of faith, that, it seems, is the most we can assume about the happenings in Nature, Lectureis an exercise in metaphysics, How could the arrangements of happenings come to be that way In answer, Cartwright urges an ontology in which powers act together in different ways depending on the arrangements they find themselves in to produce what happens.
It is a metaphysics in which possibilia are real because powers and arrangement are permissivethey constrain but often do not dictate outcomes as we see in contemporary quantum theory.
Lecture, based on Cartwright's work on evidencebased policy and randomized controlled trials, is an exercise in the philosophy of social technology: How we can put our knowledge of powers and our skills at artful modeling to work to build more decent societies and how we can use our knowledge and skills to evaluate when our attempts are working.


The lectures are important because: They offer an original view on the ageold question of scientific realism in which our knowledge is genuine, yet our scientific principles are neither true nor false but are, rather, templates for building good models.

Powers are centerstage in metaphysics right now, Backreading them from the successes of scientific practice, as Lecturedoes, provides a new perspective on what they are and how they function,
There is a loud call nowadays to make philosophy relevant to "real life, " That's just what happens in Lecture, where Cartwright applies the lesson of Lecturesandto argue for a serious rethink of the way that we are urgedand in some places mandatedto use evidence to predict the outcomes of our social policies.
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