Professor Nancy Cartwright

Professor Nancy Cartwright, is Centenary Visiting Professor in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at the University of Oxford 2025-26. She will deliver the 2025 PPE Centenary Professorship Lecture at The Queen’s College, Oxford on “Is Economics Queen of the Social Sciences?” on 12 November, at The Queen’s College, Oxford.

What brought you to Univ?
It was an honour to be asked to be the visiting centennial professor of PPE. I’m really glad to have this opportunity because I believe in unified PPE. Also, though I live in Oxford, I’m never usually in Oxford during term time and so I never meet any academics here.

What attracted you to philosophy and to your current field of research?
I had a very Calvinist upbringing, and we did a lot of deep philosophy in my church groups. I went to university to study maths and physics. The maths department was boring, the physics department was interesting, but the philosophy department was absolutely marvellous. It’s a four-year American degree so you have time to take a lot of courses, and I got to be a philosophical groupie.

The philosophy postgrads adopted me and I got pulled over from maths into logic and philosophy of science. I happened to be at a place that was really, really exciting in philosophy. I then went off to study modal logic with the premier modal logician Ruth Barcan Marcus. I went on to study philosophy of science since I had these wonderful post-grad teachers who encouraged me to look into the philosophy of physics.

I was always interested in social science and economics but, at the time, you couldn’t make a career out of the philosophy of social science as it had virtually no standing in philosophy at the time. When I got to LSE, I thought, “now’s my chance to learn more.” I took the opportunity to interact with lots of people and attended all sorts of events. I switched over from physics to social sciences while at LSE and I’ve enjoyed that ever since.

Who or what inspires you?
Intellectually, I’ve had wonderful luck, I’ve worked with some fantastic people and I’m much better at thinking things up in a group. I do find group working worthwhile for me, and that’s something I’m proud of, having been able to do that and nurture that in others.

I had wonderful undergraduate teachers who became mentors and really paid attention to me and helped me, and then I went off to be a postgrad and I worked with Ruth Barcan Marcus and Vivian Weil. Vivian became a kind of moral compass and she inspired me to make the right decisions about things.When I went to Stanford, I met Pat (Patrick) Suppes, who was absolutely wonderful, but intellectually terrifying, and I upped my game a lot just by wondering “Can I say this in front of Pat?”

What can we expect to hear about in the PPE Centenary Professorship Lecture?
The lecture attempts to bring together considerations from philosophy, politics and economics to think about the role of economics vis-à-vis the other social sciences. I hope that all three components contribute to my claim that economics isn’t and shouldn’t be “Queen of the Social Sciences”.

Another thing which will appear in my talk is the importance of middle-sized theories and middle-sized principles, something I call “tendency principles”. Philosophers have a view about laws of nature and they’re usually taken to be exceptionless generalisations, but I think most of our working technology relies on more local claims – and they’re not claims that hold universally. I’ve got excited about trying to make sense of these middle-level, middle-sized principles that we use all the time.

What other projects are you excited about?
Because of my background studying randomized controlled trials in development economics,  I’ve been working with researchers at the University of Manchester Centre in the InSilicoUK Innovation Network, led by Professor Alex Frangi, on insilico trials – trials run on virtual patients where outcomes are predicted by a mathematical model run on a computer, I’m excited about that because it’s an area of work that I’ve just started to get involved in.

What are you looking forward to about being at Univ this year?
Well, I’m looking forward getting more integrated into Univ and enjoying more of the intellectual life with the philosophy fellows and other interesting, clever people who will talk about things I don’t know anything about.