Cartwright on Laws of Nature

Laws provide the study of science with structure and definition. Philosophers of science look
to laws as a way to establish genuine scientific reasoning. One difficulty of utilizing such guidelines
in science is attempting to deduce what can and cannot be considered a law. Two approaches of
understanding laws are explained by the regularity theory as well as the necessitarian theory. The
regularity theory states that laws describe the way certain things and objects behave. Whereas, the
necessitarian approach describes laws as more than summaries of behaviors, but rather how such
things and objects must behave. Do either of these approaches to the laws of nature allow for laws to
be both true and explanatory? Nancy Cartwright believes this to be impossible. By utilizing
fundamental laws of physics, Cartwright explains how laws cannot be both factual and
descriptive. By doing so, she proves the regularity theory as well as the necessitarian theory to be
insufficient approaches to understanding laws

Nancy Cartwright challenges these laws of nature by arguing that both the regularity approach and
the necessitarian approach share a common faulty assumption. The assumption is that a
generalization must be factual for something to be considered a law. She claims that this assumption
contradicts the doctrine of facticity. Facticity regarding the laws of nature is utilized to prove laws
true by being factual or by describing the facts of our reality. In “Do the Laws of Physics State the
Facts?” Cartwright states that the fundamental laws of physics do not accurately describe facts about
our world, but instead express only descriptions of the facts. She quotes Richard Feynman to help
exemplify this point by saying “There is… a rhythm and a pattern between phenomena of nature
which is not apparent to the eye of analysis; and it is these rhythms and patterns which we call
Physical Laws… (pg.866)” This illustrates how fundamental laws of physics do not in fact describe
the phenomena and how things behave. Therefore, Cartwright states that these laws do not present a
true representation of reality
 Cartwright believes that laws must either be true or explanatory. Laws cannot explain things
and be exact at the same time. For example, the law of gravitation describes the force between two
bodies varying in their masses. However, electricity also describes forces between two bodies. This
force is defined by the variance of their charges. When bodies of masses and charges interact, the
total force between them is conducted by a combination of Coulomb’s law and the law of universal
gravitation. Individually, these laws do not describe how all bodies behave since the force may
depend on both mass and electrical charge. Thus, the law is considered to be false or
untrue. Nevertheless, the law of gravity does explain how forces among two bodies will interact in
certain ideal situations. That is, situations without electrical charge. Once charge becomes a factor,
the law of gravity can no longer simply explain these forces alone. That is why Cartwright states that
laws are either explanatory and false, or true but incapable of explanation. She calls this “a trade-off
between factual content and explanatory power” (pg. 875).
The interaction of gravity along with electricity is an example of adding two vectors to one
another. Both laws separately produce a predicted force. Together, they produce another force
known as the resultant force. Cartwright argues this idea of vector addition by saying that “Nature
does not add forces” (pg. 869). The total force that is created determines the acceleration of a
body. That final net force is what is considered to be concrete, while the component or additive
forces are thought to be invalid. With that said Cartwright’s take on vector addition explains that
laws of different properties cannot be added together and still accurately describe how bodies
behave. Instead, the nonrealistic quality of component forces leaves those laws limited to only
illustrating capabilities and tendencies of bodies. These laws do not demonstrate what bodies do, but
instead these laws predict what powers these bodies may be capable of. These laws are then
considered to be false, but still useful in understanding science. Once again, these laws fail to
describe the actual behaviors of bodies, and thus cannot be looked at from a facticity view of laws.
In conclusion, Cartwright proves both the regularity and necessitarian theories to be
faulty. These theories both imply that laws are facts or summaries about what is happening in our
world. They assume that generalizations must be true in order to be a law. Cartwright challenges
this assumption by stating that the laws used for explaining our reality are actually false because
these laws do not describe how bodies move or what is actually happening in our world. By looking
at fundamental laws of physics, we see that these laws do not describe the actual behaviors of bodies,
but they do give an explanation for how certain phenomena may come about. This goes against both
approaches to the laws of nature in two ways. The first is that the laws of physics are not true, yet
they are useful. The idea that a generalization must be true for it to be a law is falsified by
physics. Lastly, both theories render laws to describe behaviors. Only then is the law thought to be
factual and true. However, certain laws of physics do not describe behaviors or what exactly the
bodies do. Instead, these laws depict certain powers ad capabilities that the bodies may possess so
that we are able to make predictions and inferences through scientific reasoning.