Instrumentalism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In

phenomena
. According to instrumentalists, a successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes.[1] Scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict observations in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow explain these laws.[2] Instrumentalism is a perspective originally introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906.[2]

Rejecting

theoretical terms need only be useful to predict the phenomena, the observed outcomes.[3]

There are multiple versions of instrumentalism.

History

British empiricism

Main article:
British empiricism

British empiricism, John Locke, to speculate that matter is capable of thought.[6] The next leading British empiricist, George Berkeley, argued that an object's putative primary qualities as recognized by scientists, such as shape, extension, and impenetrability, are inconceivable without the putative secondary qualities of color, hardness, warmth, and so on. He also posed the question how or why an object could be properly conceived to exist independently of any perception of it.[7] Berkeley did not object to everyday talk about the reality of objects, but instead took issue with philosophers' talk, who spoke as if they knew something beyond sensory impressions that ordinary folk did not.[8]

For Berkeley, a scientific theory does not state causes or explanations, but simply identifies perceived types of objects and traces their typical regularities.

observational terms.[9]

The last great British empiricist, David Hume, posed a number of challenges to Francis Bacon's inductivism, which had been the prevailing, or at least the professed view concerning the attainment of scientific knowledge. Regarding himself as having placed his own theory of knowledge on par with Newton's theory of motion, Hume supposed that he had championed inductivism over scientific realism. Upon reading Hume's work, Immanuel Kant was "awakened from dogmatic slumber", and thus sought to neutralise any threat to science posed by Humean empiricism. Kant would develop the first stark philosophy of physics.[10]

Transcendental idealism

Main article: Transcendental idealism

To save Newton's law of universal gravitation,

phenomena, which are humans' recognized experiences. And so mind itself contains the structure that determines space, time, and substance, how mind's own categorization of noumena renders space Euclidean, time constant, and objects' motions exhibiting the very determinism predicted by Newtonian physics. Kant apparently presumed that the human mind, rather than a phenomenon itself that had evolved, had been predetermined and set forth upon the formation of humankind. In any event, the mind also was the veil of appearance that scientific methods could never lift. And yet the mind could ponder itself and discover such truths, although not on a theoretical level, but only by means of ethics. Kant's metaphysics, then, transcendental idealism
, secured science from doubt—in that it was a case of "synthetic a priori" knowledge ("universal, necessary and informative")—and yet discarded hope of scientific realism.

Logical empiricism

Main article:
Logical empiricism

Since the mind has virtually no power to know anything beyond direct sensory experience,

empirio-criticism) verged on idealism. It was alleged to even be a surreptitious solipsism, whereby all that exists is one's own mind. Mach's positivism also strongly asserted the ultimate unity of the empirical sciences. Mach's positivism asserted phenomenalism as to new basis of scientific theory, all scientific terms to refer to either actual or potential sensations, thus eliminating hypotheses while permitting such seemingly disparate scientific theories as physical and psychological to share terms and forms. Phenomenalism was insuperably difficult to implement, yet heavily influenced a new generation of philosophers of science, who emerged in the 1920s while terming themselves logical positivists while pursuing a program termed verificationism
. Logical positivists aimed not to instruct or restrict scientists, but to enlighten and structure philosophical discourse to render scientific philosophy that would verify philosophical statements as well as scientific theories, and align all human knowledge into a scientific worldview, freeing humankind from so many of its problems due to confused or unclear language.

The verificationists expected a strict gap between theory versus observation, mirrored by a theory's

observable terms. Believing a theory's posited unobservables to always correspond to observations, the verificationists viewed a scientific theory's theoretical terms, such as electron, as metaphorical or elliptical at observations, such as white streak in cloud chamber. They believed that scientific terms lacked meanings unto themselves, but acquired meanings from the logical structure that was the entire theory that in turn matched patterns of experience. So by translating theoretical terms into observational terms and then decoding the theory's mathematical/logical structure, one could check whether the statement indeed matched patterns of experience, and thereby verify the scientific theory false or true. Such verification would be possible, as never before in science, since translation of theoretical terms into observational terms would make the scientific theory purely empirical, none metaphysical. Yet the logical positivists ran into insuperable difficulties. Moritz Schlick debated with Otto Neurath over foundationalism
—the traditional view traced to Descartes as founder of modern Western philosophy—whereupon only nonfoundationalism was found tenable. Science, then, could not find a secure foundation of indubitable truth.

And since science aims to reveal not private but public truths, verificationists switched from phenomenalism to

Carl Hempel found the paradox of confirmation. By the 1950s, the verificationists had established philosophy of science as subdiscipline within academia's philosophy departments. By 1962, verificationists had asked and endeavored to answer seemingly all the great questions about scientific theory. Their discoveries showed that the idealized scientific worldview was naively mistaken. By then the leader of the legendary venture, Hempel raised the white flag that signaled verificationism's demise. Suddenly striking Western society, then, was Kuhn's landmark thesis, introduced by none other than Carnap, verificationism's greatest firebrand. Instrumentalism exhibited by scientists often does not even discern unobservable from observable entities.[3]

Historical turn

Main article:
Historical turn

From the 1930s until

logical empiricism, wherein a scientific theory was held to be a logical structure whose terms all ultimately refer to some form of observation, while an objective process neutrally arbitrates theory choice, compelling scientists to decide which scientific theory was superior. Physicists knew better, but, busy developing the Standard Model, were so steeped in developing quantum field theory, that their talk, largely metaphorical, perhaps even metaphysical, was unintelligible to the public, while the steep mathematics warded off philosophers of physics.[4] By the 1980s, physicists regarded not particles, but fields as the more fundamental, and no longer even hoped to discover what entities and processes might be truly fundamental to nature, perhaps not even the field.[4][5]
Kuhn had not claimed to have developed a novel thesis, but instead hoped to synthesize more usefully recent developments in the philosophy and history of science.

Scientific realism

Main article: Scientific realism

One scientific realist, Karl Popper, rejected all variants of positivism via its focus on sensations rather than realism, and developed critical rationalism instead. Popper alleged that instrumentalism reduces basic science to what is merely applied science.[11] The British physicist David Deutsch, in his much later 1997 book The Fabric of Reality, followed Popper's critique of instrumentalism and argued that a scientific theory stripped of its explanatory content would be of strictly limited utility.[12]

Constructive empiricism as a form of instrumentalism

Main article: Constructive empiricism

Bas van Fraassen's (1980)[13] project of constructive empiricism focuses on belief in the domain of the observable, so for this reason it is described as a form of instrumentalism.[14]

In the philosophy of mind

In the

concepts
on which we can base scientific investigations of mind and brain, but that acting as if other beings have beliefs is a successful strategy.

Relation to pragmatism

Instrumentalism is closely related to pragmatism, the position that practical consequences are an essential basis for determining meaning, truth or value.

Notable proponents

See also

Notes

  1. metaphysical dimension of realism
    (as in Carnap 1950)".
    • Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 62: "Strictly we should distinguish two sorts of anti-realism. According to the first sort, talk of unobservable entities is not to be understood literally at all. So when a scientist pus forward a theory about electrons, for example, we should not take him to be asserting the existence of entities called 'electrons'. Rather, his talk of electrons is metaphorical. This form of anti-realism was popular in the first half of the 20th century, but few people advocate it today. It was motivated largely by a doctrine in the philosophy of language, according to which it is not possible to make meaningful assertions about things that cannot in principle be observed, a doctrine that few contemporary philosophers accept. The second sort of anti-realism accepts that talk of unobservable entities should be taken at face value: if a theory says that electrons are negatively charged, it is true if electrons do exist and are negatively charged, but false otherwise. But we will never know which, says the anti-realist. So the correct attitude towards the claims that scientists make about unobservable reality is one of total agnosticism. They are either true or false, but we are incapable of finding out which. Most modern anti-realism is of this second sort".
  2. ^
    things-in-themselves
    that religious myth and philosophical speculation have hitherto been unable to supply. Their explanation makes no sense unless (i) there is, 'beneath the sense appearances revealed to us by our perceptions, [...] a reality different from these appearances' and (ii) we know 'the nature of the elements which constitute' that reality (p 7). Thus, physical theory cannot explain—in the stated sense—the laws established by experiment unless it depends on metaphysics and thus remains subject to the interminable disputes of metaphysicians. Worse still, the teachings of no metaphysical school are sufficiently detailed and precise to account for all of the elements of physical theory (p 18). Duhem instead assigns to physical theories a more modest but autonomous and readily attainable aim: 'A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, derived from a small number of principles, whose purpose is to represent a set of experimental laws as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible (Duhem 1914, p. 24)".
  3. ^ a b c P Kyle Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 198.
  4. ^ a b c Roberto Torretti, The Philosophy of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 396–97, including quote: "First, quantum field theories have been the working theories at the frontline of physics for over 30 years. Second, these theories appear to do away with the familiar conception of physical systems as aggregates of substantive individual particles. This conception was already undermined by Bose–Einstein and Fermi–Dirac statistics (§6.1.4), according to which the so-called particles cannot be assigned a definite trajectory in ordinary space. But quantum field theories go a long step further and—or so it would seem—conceive 'particles' as excitation modes of the field. This, I presume, motivated Howard Stein's saying that 'the quantum theory of fields is the contemporary locus of metaphysical research' (1970, p. 285). Finally, the very fact that physicists conspicuously and fruitfully resort to unperspicacious theories can teach us something about the aim and reach of science. Here is how physicists work, dirty-handed, in their everyday practice, a far cry from what is taught at the Sunday school of the 'scientific worldview' ".
  5. ^ a b Meinard Kuhlmann, "Physicists debate whether the world is made of particles or fields—or something else entirely, Scientific American, 2013 Aug;309(2).
  6. ^ Torretti 1999 p. 75.
  7. ^ Torretti 1999 p. 101–02.
  8. ^ a b c d Torretti 1999 p. 102.
  9. ^ Torretti 1999 p. 103.
  10. ^ Torretti 1999 p. 98: "I shall dwell at some length on Kant's conception of the sources and scope of Newton's conceptual frame, for it was the first full-blown philosophy of physics and remains to this day the most significant".
  11. ISBN 0-415-28594-1
    , quote: "Instrumentalism can be formulated as the thesis that scientific theories—the theories of the so-called 'pure' sciences—are nothing but computational rules (or inference rules); of the same character, fundamentally, as the computation rules of the so-called 'applied' sciences. (One might even formulate it as the thesis that "pure" science is a misnomer, and that all science is 'applied'.) Now my reply to instrumentalism consists in showing that there are profound differences between "pure" theories and technological computation rules, and that instrumentalism can give a perfect description of these rules but is quite unable to account for the difference between them and the theories".
  12. OCLC 36393434.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
    )
  13. ^ van Fraassen, Bas C., 1980, The Scientific Image, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  14. ^ Chakravartty, Anjan (August 13, 2017). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved August 13, 2019 – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  15. ^ a b Gouinlock, James, "What is the Legacy of Instrumentalism? Rorty's Interpretation of Dewey." In Herman J. Saatkamp, ed., Rorty and Pragmatism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995.

Sources

  • Torretti, Roberto, The Philosophy of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Berkeley, pp. 98, 101–4.
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