ABSTRACT
Nancy Cartwright has been both an empiricist and a realist. Where many philosophers have thought that these two positions are incompatible (or, at any rate, very strange bedfellows), right from her first book, the muchdiscussed and controversial How the Laws of Physics Lie, Cartwright tried to make a case for the following view: if empiricism allows a certain type of method in its methodological arsenal (inference to the most likely cause), then an empiricist cannot but be a scientific realist-in the metaphysically interesting sense of being ontically committed to the existence of unobservable entities. Many empiricists thought that because empiricism has been traditionally antimetaphysics, it has to be antirealist. One of the major contributions that Cartwright has made to philosophy of science is, I think, precisely this: there is a sense in which metaphysics can be respectable to empiricists. Hence, scientific realism cannot be dismissed on the grounds that it ventures into metaphysics. To be sure, the metaphysics that Cartwright is fond of is not of the standard a priori (or armchair) sort. It is tied to scientific practice and aims to recover basic elements of this practice (e.g., causal inference). But it is metaphysics, nonetheless.
