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Is the World Really “Dappled”? A Response to Cartwright’s Charge against “Cross‐Wise Reduction”

Nancy Cartwright’s charge against horizontal reductionism leads to a claim about how the world is, namely “dappled.” By proposing a simple thought‐experiment, I show that Cartwright’s division of the world into “nomological” machines and “messy” systems for which no law applies is meaningless. The thought‐experiment shows that for a system, having the property of being a nomological machine depends on what kind of questions you ask about it. No metaphysical conclusion about the world being unruly or not can be drawn from a division that is question‐dependent. Moreover, I argue that this predicament undermines Cartwright’s attempt to provide an illustration of how bad metaphysics of science translates into bad scientific methodologies and policies.