Instrumentalism

Instrumentalism is the philosophical view that scientific theories are tools — instruments for organizing experience, generating predictions, and enabling successful action — rather than descriptions of an independently existing reality. On this view, the question 'is this theory true?' is less important than 'does this theory work?' The instrumentalist does not claim that quarks, genes, or utility functions do not exist; they claim that the epistemic status of these posits is their predictive and organizational utility, not their correspondence to a mind-independent world. Instrumentalism is the implicit epistemology of much of applied science: engineers use Newtonian mechanics without believing it is fundamentally true (it has been superseded by relativity and quantum mechanics), because it works for the problem class they are addressing. John Dewey explicitly identified his pragmatism with instrumentalism: thought is an instrument for resolving problematic situations, and scientific theories are the most powerful such instruments developed. The primary objection is that successful prediction requires that at least some posited entities approximately correspond to reality — a coincidence that instrumentalism cannot explain. This is the scientific realism argument from the no-miracles argument, and it has not been definitively answered by instrumentalists.