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Concept
Instrumentalism
Summary
In philosophy of science and in epistemology, instrumentalism is a methodological view that ideas are useful instruments, and that the worth of an idea is based on how effective it is in explaining and predicting natural phenomena.
According to instrumentalists, a successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes. 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. Instrumentalism is a perspective originally introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906.
Rejecting scientific realism's ambitions to uncover metaphysical truth about nature, instrumentalism is usually categorized as an antirealism, although its mere lack of commitment to scientific theory's realism can be termed nonrealism. Instrumentalism merely bypasses debate concerning whether, for example, a particle spoken about in particle physics is a discrete entity enjoying individual existence, or is an excitation mode of a region of a field, or is something else altogether. Instrumentalism holds that theoretical terms need only be useful to predict the phenomena, the observed outcomes.
There are multiple versions of instrumentalism.
British empiricism
Newton's theory of motion, whereby any object instantly interacts with all other objects across the universe, motivated the founder of British empiricism, John Locke, to speculate that matter is capable of thought. 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.
Official source
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