Instrumentalism—the view that a scientific theory is no more than its empirical predictions—is widely rejected in philosophy of science, again because it relies on a sharp distinction between empirical and theoretical parts of a theory which scientific practice does not sustain. The predominant ‘scientific realist’ position in science and philosophy takes scientific theories literally as attempted descriptions of what is really going on in a system, even when some parts of that description are invisible to the naked eye.
instrumentalism
