Nancy Cartwright’s concepts of “science by pun”/“inference by pun,” “Ballung concepts” (what I call abstract nouns), and “precisification” relate to word abuse - sadly her criticisms usually presume causal models that make predictions, which is a lot to ask apparently
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I thought she was famous for arguing against causal models and for the view that all laws are constitutive with no fundamental ones?
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she’s criticizing causal models - but many items of bad science aren’t even causal
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Nope she is not against causation. The seeming disagreement is really about clarifying role of interventions. You can't naively say interventions give you causation, because once you intervene, you no longer observe naturally occurring causation in the world.
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