The Instrument of Science

Roughly instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily and should primarily be an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view such as logical positivism suffered from serious defects. In this book however Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This positionââcognitive instrumentalismââinvolves three core theses. First science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. There are examples from science throughout the book and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding empirical understanding which we can achieve without having true or even approximately true representations of unobservable things. In closing the book he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism constructive empiricism and semirealism. Overall this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science. . Language: English