Postscript on the Realism-Instrumentalism Debate
The body of the monograph has throughout skirted around the philosophic literature comprising the “realist-instrumentalist” debate. This Postscript does not take sides in this debate, but offers suggestions intended to make the debate more tractable. One suggestion concerns two largely ignored distinctions: the first between theoretical claims that enter into the design of an experiment constitutively versus only heuristically; the second between intermediate standings a hypothesis can have between its being a mere conjecture and its becoming deeply entrenched through the success of research predicated on it. The second half of the Postscript explains why, of all elements of science, the equations in theory-mediated measurement that authorize values for target quantities to be obtained from values of more accessible quantities and the values so obtained can, under identifiable conditions, have the strongest claim to permanence in the face of both new data and theory change.