Abstract
I follow Howard Stein’s project of reconciliation between two attitudes towards scientific theories that are standardly taken to be diametrically opposed to one another-realism and instrumentalism. Stein argued that realism and instrumentalism are fruitfully combined with one another in the work of the greatest scientists, and, in particular, in the work of Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein. These works entail realism in so far as their goal is adequately and correctly “to represent the phenomena of nature”. However, they entail instrumentalism also, in so far as Newtonian methodology explicitly includes the possibility (and even probability) that any theory with justifiable claims to truth (e. g., Newtonian universal gravitation) can eventually lead to a quite distinct theory with even better such claims to truth (Einsteinian general relativity).
