I will explain in the following paper why I believe that realism and instrumentalism are erroneous approaches to science and why empiricism seems to be the more valid approach. I believe that truth is relative to language. The word theory in greek means “to be in front of”. Our science is limited by our language, because we use our language as a way to construct our world. We use our language and theories to paint over the world what we think exists and while we use that language to create that reality, we paint over other “realitites”, which we don’t acknowledge, because we know no better. Scientific claims can be true in their own proper domain but they don’t tell the whole story, or even that there is a whole story to tell. The distinguishing features of realism are twofold: realism seeks truth as a goal and when a realist accepts a theory it is accepted as true. So to argue realism would be to argue that no other realities have any causal effect on the observed phenomenon. There can be other truths – different stories about the world – each of which it may be proper to believe. I think its quite narcissistic, not to mention egotistical, to think that we know the totality of science to the extent that we think we’re qualified to make such conjectures about the true nature of the world in which we live. Therefore, I consider realism to be an erroneous approach to science.Before determining the validity of instrumentalism, I think we must look at history to help us determine science’s overall purpose. I believe that science precipitates from an inner curiosity how about how the world works. I believe that after looking into the past, we can deduce that science has had a dual function: to explain observable or unobservable phenomenon and to help predict the outcome of our actions. For example, with the gravitational theory, at first we attempted to explain the motion of fall...
