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The Paradox of Instrumentalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

David Papineau
David Papineau*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

J.J.C. Smart says that instrumentalism makes it “surprising that the world should be such as to contain these odd and ontologically disconnected phenomena…. Is It not odd that the phenomena of the world should be such as to make a purely instrumental theory true? On the other hand, if we interpret the theory in a realist way, then we have no need for such a cosmic coincidence…. A lot of surprising facts no longer seem surprising….” (Smart 1963, p. 39).

Intuitively Smart seems right. The instrumentalist, who believes the observational consequences of some theory, but eschews any commitment to the theory itself, ends up believing something far less plausible than the realist, who can account for those consequences in terms of the theory.

Type
Part IV. General Philosophy Of Science (A)
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 269 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1986

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank D.M. Armstrong, Jeremy Butterfield, David Lewis, and D.H. Mellor for helpful comments on predecessors of this paper. In particular, I would like to thank David Lewis for curing me of my confusions about the atheist-agnostic distinction: the representation of atheism as -T&O, realism as T&O, and agnosticism as the disjunction between them was suggested by Lewis.

References

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