Instrumentalism And Realism

How does science play in the explanation of reality? It would seem in that in the era we live in now science emerged to play a very big role. Considering that it is the largest bodies of investigation we have, along with being the most socially acceptable. Although, that seems to be the issue at hand here, that science discovers things about our reality and most people at large, tend to accept the reported findings. Most people walk through life reading magazines articles that report scientific discoveries without ever questioning how or why that was the conclusion science arrived at. In this paper the goal is to question the methodology in which science uses to arrive at certain conclusions, and what does said conclusion mean. The two contrasting …show more content…
Although, in this new era we live in, new fields of studies have cropped up. These studies have been forced to take modified approaches to studying these new phenomena. What is this new field I speak of? It is called psychology. One of the big questions that Instrumentalism has to face is can it compensate for the new field of scientific study. One of the more indirect problems that Instrumentalism has to face, isn’t with the view itself, but of those who adopt it. What I mean by that is that Instrumentalism is mostly adopted by scientific realists. Which in short, scientific realism is the view that all or reality is real and can be proven scientifically. That view poses a problem with the advent of psychology around the turn of the century. This view which could also be called scientific Instrumentalism, seems to falter when faced with some of the abstract concepts that psychology deals with, the mind for example. Not to say, that scientific realism doesn’t recognizes the existence of the mind, but more along the lines of questions some of the pragmatic purposed structures put forth by some philosophers and psychologist. The one claim that scientific Instrumentalism does offer in response to this is that, as instrument and measurement design improves it will become easier to detect unobserved …show more content…
This view has had a prestigious history of followers and has been the dominate view in science for a long time. Although this view has shown itself to work well with the physical sciences, it does seem to have a shaky relationship with the field of psychology. The same can be said about the Manipulationist view. This view is a lot newer and seems to be less robust as Instrumentalism, but I see no reason why it could work well with the physical sciences. Again, when we put it up against the litmus test of psychology it seems to fail. Thus, after evaluating both of these views, I find Instrumentalism to possess superior explanatory power in comparison to