Q&A with Nancy Cartwright
The legendary Nancy Cartwright—Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego—joins us for a brief exchange. She is the author most recently of A Philosopher Looks At Science (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Are there one or two authors that have had an outsized influence on your work overall?
I’d say Otto Neurath and Elizabeth Anscombe, plus so may wonderful teachers and mentors I have had.
Do you have a favorite novel or novelist or fiction genre?
Since having children I find I get too upset reading anything at all sad. And I don’t really like comic novels. So I end up reading tons of detective stories, but of the old-fashioned kind—where nobody gets tortured and nothing bad happens to children. I’m sure this has had an influence on my “argument theory of evidence,” which I advocate for evidence-based policy.
Can we expect more books from you in the future?
I have a contract to write a book for Cambridge University Press with philosopher John Pemberton and child protection specialist Eileen Munro. It is on “singular causation”—what will cause what in this case (as opposed to in general) and how to provide good evidence for such claims—which is especially important for predicting what will happen when we act.
