Metaphysics of Science
Mumford was a project leader for The University of Nottingham in the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded three-year research project: the metaphysics of science. Mumford worked alongside Alexander Bird (Bristol) and Helen Beebee (Birmingham) within this project with their joint focus on "causes, laws, kinds, and dispositions". The project was described with the following abstract: "We naturally think that what happens in the universe is governed by laws of nature. We also think that events are causally related to other events, that things are naturally classified into kinds (physical, chemical and biological kinds, for example), and that at least some natural kinds have distinctive dispositions (for example, the disposition of NaCl to dissolve in water). This project explored how, or whether, all these distinct notions - law, cause, natural kind, disposition - can be made to fit together into a coherent and unified worldview. For example, must two causally related events be such that they are members of kinds that are lawfully related? Must those kinds be natural kinds? Are natural kinds distinguished from one another by the fact that members of different kinds are disposed to behave in different ways?".
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