Science & Tech Quote by Nancy Cartwright

Cartwright’s line is a neatly tossed grenade at the comforting bedtime story we tell about science: that the universe runs on a few pristine equations, and physicists are just reading them aloud. She’s arguing that what we call “fundamental laws” work less like courtroom testimony and more like stage dialogue: compelling, efficient, and not strictly “true” in the way a literal transcript would be.

The intent is to puncture a common prestige myth. Physics earns cultural authority by sounding like it reports reality from nowhere, with no fingerprints. Cartwright flips that: the very features that make laws powerful - simplicity, generality, elegance - depend on idealizations that aren’t actually found in the messy world. Think frictionless planes, point masses, perfectly rational agents. “Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false” isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-naivete about how models travel.

The subtext is a trade-off: realism versus reach. If you patch the laws to include all the caveats needed to make them literally accurate, they turn into bloated, situation-specific statements that explain less and predict less. Explanatory force comes from selective blindness. We don’t model everything; we model what matters for a task.

Context matters because this is a philosopher of science taking aim at reductionist bravado, the idea that higher-level phenomena are just footnotes to particle physics. Cartwright is staking out a more pluralist view: science advances through a toolbox of models tuned to contexts, not a single holy script. The punchline is uncomfortable precisely because it’s practical: our best knowledge often succeeds by being strategically untrue.