The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities

Abstract

That anyone today should seriously contend that the entities referred to by scientific theories are only convenient fictions, or that talk about such entities is translatable without remainder into talk about sense con­ tents or everyday physical objects, or that such talk should be regarded as belonging to a mere calculating device and, thus, without cognitive content-such contentions strike me as so incongruous with the scientific and rational attitude and practice that I feel this paper should turn out to be a demolition of straw men. But the instrumentalist views of out­ standing physicists such as Bohr and Heisenberg are too well known to be cited, and in a recent book of great competence, Professor Ernest Nagel concludes that “ the opposition between [the realist and the in­ strumentalist] views [of theories] is a conflict over preferred modes of speech” and “ the question as to which of them is the ‘correct position' has only terminological interest/'1 The phoenix, it seems, will not be laid to rest.

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