Instrumentalism vs. Realism and Social Construction

An important debate in the philosophy of science, whether an instrumentalist or realist viewof science correctly characterizes science, is examined in this paper through the lens of a relateddebate, namely whether science is a social construct or not. The latter debate arose in responseto Kuhn’s work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argued that while thereexists a process through which scientific understanding evolves from primitive to increasinglyrefined ideas, it does not describe progress ’toward’ anything. Kuhn’s work was then used toargue that there is no such thing as a knowable objective reality, a view much in agreementwith that of the instrumentalist.This paper argues that a generalized version of the correspondence principle applied to a theory’sdomain of validity is an exclusive feature of science which distinguishes it from sociallyconstructed phenomena and thereby supports the realist position. According to this argument,progress in science can be characterized as the replacement of old paradigms by new ones withgreater domains of validity which obey the correspondence principle where the two paradigmsoverlap. This characterization, however, is susceptible to the instrumentalist objection that itdoes not fit the transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. In response, it is requiredthat this argument depend on the intactness of certain core concepts in the face of experimentalchallenge within some regions of the theory’s original domain of validity. While this requirementsaves the argument and even offers an answer to the question of what it would take for our mostestablished theories in physics, relativity and quantum theory, to suffer the same fate as Aristotelianphysics, it also defers a conclusive resolution to the debate between instrumentalistsand realists until it can be determined whether an ultimate theory of nature can be found.