Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics By Nancy Cartwright: Summary

摘要

Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economicsn(HC&UT) is about notions of causality appropriate to the sciences, mostlyngeneric causal claims (causal laws) and especially notions that connect causalitynwith probability.1 Most of the work for the book is associated with thenproject ‘Causality: Metaphysics and Methods’. This project argued thatnmetaphysics – our account of what causal laws are or what general causalnclaims say – should march hand-in-hand with our ways of establishing them.nIt should be apparent, given the kind of thing we think causality is, why ournmethods are good for finding it. If our metaphysics does not mesh with andnunderwrite the methods, we are willing to trust, we should be wary of both.