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Instrumentalism Revisited

Critica 31 (91):3-39 (1999)

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Cognitive Instrumentalism about Mental Representations.Samuel D. Taylor - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3):518-550.details Representationalists and anti-representationalists disagree about whether a naturalisation of mental content is possible and, hence, whether positing mental representations in cognitive science is justified. Here, I develop a novel way to think about mental representations based on a philosophical description of (cognitive) science inspired by cognitive instrumentalism. On this view, our acceptance of theories positing mental representations and our beliefs in (something like) mental representations do not depend on the naturalisation of content. Thus, I conclude that if we endorse cognitive (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 2 citations
Realism versus instrumentalism in a new statistical framework.Gregory M. Mikkelson - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (4):440-447.details In this paper, I offer a new defense of scientific realism, tailored for the Akaikean paradigm of statistical hypothesis testing. After proposing definitions of verisimilitude and predictive success, I use computer simulations to show how the latter depends on the former, even in the kind of case featured in a recent argument for instrumentalism. Download Export citation Bookmark 6 citations
In dialectical tension: realist and instrumentalist attitudes in scientific practice.Yoichi Ishida - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2665-2694.details Stein has raised a fundamental problem for any attempt to characterize instrumentalism and realism as substantive alternatives. This is the distinguishability problem, which consists in the problem of developing a form of instrumentalism that is substantially different from a plausible realist alternative and the problem of showing that this form of instrumentalism does justice to actual scientific practice. Using Stein’s own discussion of Maxwell, I formulate instrumentalism and realism as a scientist’s attitudes toward models, where an attitude is understood to (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 1 citation
Akaike and the No Miracle Argument for Scientific Realism.Alireza Fatollahi - 2023 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 53 (1):21-37.details The “No Miracle Argument” for scientific realism contends that the only plausible explanation for the predictive success of scientific theories is their truthlikeness, but doesn’t specify what ‘truthlikeness’ means. I argue that if we understand ‘truthlikeness’ in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, the resulting realist thesis (RKL) is a plausible explanation for science’s success. Still, RKL probably falls short of the realist’s ideal. I argue, however, that the strongest version of realism that the argument can plausibly establish is RKL. The (...) Download Export citation Bookmark
The problem of model selection and scientific realism.Stanislav Larski - unknowndetails This thesis has two goals. Firstly, we consider the problem of model selection for the purposes of prediction. In modern science predictive mathematical models are ubiquitous and can be found in such diverse fields as weather forecasting, economics, ecology, mathematical psychology, sociology, etc. It is often the case that for a given domain of inquiry there are several plausible models, and the issue then is how to discriminate between them – this is the problem of model selection. We consider approaches (...) Download Export citation Bookmark

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