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Five Theses on Instrumental Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Davis Baird
Davis Baird*
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
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Extract

Some may find an oxymoron in my title. But, my use of “instrumental” is to focus attention on the real instruments of science-pumps, dynamos and cyclotrons-and not the view that scientific theories are best understood as instruments. In what follows I characterize and argue for a kind of realism strongly wedded to what we do with scientific instruments, and divorced from what our theories may say about the entities manipulated by these instruments. My discussion owes much to Ian Hacking’s “Experimental Argument for Realism” (Hacking 1983, ch. 16).

The following fantasy might help give some idea of the view I am interested in. Suppose that the diskettes, which many people use in conjunction with a small computer, do not store information magnetically; in fact they store it “radioactively,” exactly how, is not relevant. IBM decided that many people in their target personal computer market would be put off by “nuclear diskettes.”

Type
Part VI. Realism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 164 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

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