instrumentalism

To me, EBM is medical instrumentalism (instrumentalism is one of philosophies of sciences): pick a treatment that works, without understanding the underlying mechanism.

To me, EBM is medical instrumentalism (as instrumentalism is one of philosophies of sciences): pick a treatment that works for a large number of people, without understanding the underlying mechanism.

In many human situations, just instrumentalism (a philosophical stance) would do, without even understanding the underlying reality.

Think about what instrumentalism really means.

Calling theories useful if they predict future events is called Instrumentalism and it’s a dead end if your goal is to understand reality.

This is more a realist, than an instrumentalist position, which perhaps is what you subscribe to, but tbh instrumentalism always seemed indefensible to me.

I consider Instrumentalism and Bayesian epistemology to be the best we can get towards knowledge.

In that light I can't see a way of reading Asimov advocating progress that would commit him to that kind of instrumentalism.

And the sense of crisis comes not from instrumentalism's commitments but from identifying progress with 'intuitively familiar' as if outgrowing our conceptual inheritance were failure rather than discovery.

I don't think instrumentalism makes sense for reasons unrelated to this discussion.

Put that into instrumentalism's pipe and smoke it.

I'd argue the opposite is true for anyone who has studied statistics which is largely built on Instrumentalism (think George Box: 'All models are wrong, but some are useful') and Popperian falsification (Null Hypothesis testing).

The whole point of the "never use cat" Unix advice is a war between instrumentalism and design purism.

And I mentioned "atomism as a theory of science" under the instrumentalism part of my comment.

Claiming there's no difference between prediction and understanding reminds me to what philosophers of science call "instrumentalism": theories are only to be judged by how well they work in predicting facts.

The strong version, "instrumentalism", boils down to roughly: science does not discover any "truths" about the universe, but rather is just a process of building mathematical models that correctly predict observations.

If you really want to traumatize yourself, learn about Scientific Realism vs Instrumentalism.

They teach us Scientific Realism in school, but reality is that we are really using Instrumentalism.