Re-inflating the Realism-Instrumentalism Controversy

Compatibilist instrumentalism, aka irenic instrumentalism, exemplified in the work of Rudolf Carnap and Ernest Nagel, tended to underestimate the ontic differences between realism and instrumentalism making the claim that the two positions are merely different modes of speech (Nagel) of that they differ only qua languages (Carnap). Compatibilism as such did not last for a long time but it’s taken two new leases of life. The first is in the very influential paper by Stein in the early 1990s. The second is in Kyle Stanford’s recent work. Between them, the arguments by Stein and Stanford aim to deflate the realist-instrumentalism controversy and to make instrumentalism palatable as a view of science. The aim of this paper is to show that compatibilism fails. Instrumentalism and realism are genuine rivals. Hence, the difference between realism and instrumentalism (even when they are taken to be ‘sophisticated’) is deep and philosophically significant. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG