Abstract
Instrumentalism is the belief that good theories about unobservable things are at best merely instruments for generating new truths from ones that are already known. They are not themselves to be taken as true, but merely as useful in the prediction of observable consequences. Realism is the contrary belief that if there is no known falsehood among the logical entailments of some theory conjoined with any set of known propositions, then that theory and all its ontological implications are to be taken seriously. If what seems to be a truth preserving theory implies the existence of atoms and electrons, then we should believe in atoms and electrons, says the realist. If we do not believe in the existential entailments of a theory, then the theory should be discarded.
This paper was presented to the annual conference of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science in Brisbane, Queensland in 1994. Thanks are due to the University of Queensland for providing the study leave during which a first draft of this paper was written, and also to colleagues at the University of Queensland, to Jack Smart, Hugh Mellor, Jeremy Butterfield, Peter Lipton and Jonathan Harrison for useful discussion of that draft.
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Hinckfuss, I. (1996). Instrumental Theories: Possibilities and Space and Time. In: Riggs, P.J. (eds) Natural Kinds, Laws of Nature and Scientific Methodology. Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8607-8_11
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