Nature, the Artful Modeler by Nancy Cartwright;

Author:Nancy Cartwright;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

POWERS

Happily for us, this often happens in predictable ways, either naturally or because we have engineered arrangements that have just the characteristics where our predictions are reliable. To mark this, I have long talked about nature’s capacities, but since my capacities are similar in many ways to the powers that many metaphysicians and a few philosophers of science now embrace, I shall here use the more usual term ‘powers’, as I have done in chapters 1 to 3. Massive objects have the power of gravitational attraction; charged objects, the power of Coulomb attraction and repulsion. As I argued in chapter 2, this does not mean that there is something in the world anything over and above the massive object and what it does. The ascription of a power to an object in virtue of features it possesses marks out a complicated pattern of facts about what happens when those features act in a variety of arrangements. Masses influence accelerations of massive objects; charges influence accelerations of charged objects. When mass and charge act together on a body in a specific arrangement, so long as nothing else influences its acceleration, what happens is predictable in the well-known way, as in Millikan’s famous oil drop experiment where the charged droplet hovers motionless while pulled down by gravity and up by an electromagnetic field, a result we reliably predict from

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