Northcott is founding co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements series in Philosophy of Science, and recently finished a term as Honorary Secretary of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. He has published extensively on the philosophy of economics and other sciences, and on causation and causal explanation. His new book, ‘Science for a Fragile World’, develops a systematic position on the methodology of non-laboratory sciences.
Science for a Fragile World
Imagine two worlds. In one, causal relations and mechanisms hold reliably across many cases; laws are unchanging. In the second world, by contrast, these things are fragile, holding only unreliably: just because one thing causes another over there doesn’t mean that it causes it over here. Much of our world is like the second world. I will discuss some consequences of this.