In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

I IT is often declared or evidently assumed that causality is some kind of necessary connexion, or alternatively, that being caused is — non-trivially ...

A scholarly edition of a work by David Hume. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.