many positivists still clung to instrumentalism, the view that science is simply a tool for organizing and predicting perceptions, and that the metaphysical content of theories was unnecessary. The realists pointed out that this was untenable as well. If the unobservable “metaphysical” content of our best scientific theories—stuff like electrons—really bears no relation at all to the actual stuff in the world, then why do our scientific theories work at all? The theories themselves suggest explanations for the phenomena that we see based on the unobserved stuff. But if the unobserved stuff is
...more
