Nature's capacities and their measurement
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Nature's capacities and their measurement
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1994, c1989
1st pbk. [ed.]
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Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book argues for the place of capacities within an grounds of meaning, not method. Yet it is questions of method that should concern the modern empiricist: can capacities be measured? Cartwright argues that they are measured if anything is. Stanford University's Gravity-Probe-B will measure capacities in a cryogenic dewar deep in space. More mundanely, we use probabilities to measure capacities, and the assumptions required to ensure that probabilities are a
reliable instrument are investigated in the opening chapters of this book, where the early methods of econometrics set a model. The last chapter applies lessons about probabilities and capacities to quantum mechanics and the Bell inequalities. The central thesis throughout is that capacities not
only can be admitted by empiricists, but indeed must be - otherwise the empirical methods of modern science will make no sense.
Table of Contents
- How to get causes from probabilities
- No causes in
- no causes out
- Singular causes first
- Capacities
- Abstract and concrete
- What econometrics can teach quantum physics: causality and the Bell inequality
by "Nielsen BookData"