Venue: Rm 202, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU
About the theme
Cartwright (2007) believes that her
work shares much in common with Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl
Craver’s mechanistic philosophy. Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000) propose a
dualistic account of mechanisms and believe that it stands in opposition to
both substantivalist and process-ontology accounts. They locate Cartwright
within the camp of substantivalists. In this article, I demonstrate that this
disagreement can be eliminated and the two accounts are complementary. By
comparing Cartwright’s work with that of Machamer, Darden, and Craver, I show
that the two accounts presuppose each other’s concepts, and, therefore, that
they share a common theoretical structure. But these commonalities oblige them
to meet a challenge standardly issued by those philosophers who insist that
laws play a crucial role in causal explanations. I argue that this challenge
can be overcome by integrating the two accounts.
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