ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the realist-instrumentalist-empiricist debate. It focuses on the emergence of more moderate accounts of the scientific enterprise typified by the Natural Ontological Attitude. The chapter aims to understand the strengths and weaknesses of such accounts in order to establish the context in which use the account of constants. The traditional Achilles heal of realism, as contrasted with idealism, has been its failure to justify adequately the existence of an independent externalised world to which our beliefs and theories ideally correspond: what some have called ‘a transcendent reality’. According to traditional realists, even the most sophisticated accounts of instrumentalism suffer from the classical problems of inadequacy of explanation, and failure to ground satisfactorily the instrumental reliability of theories. Constructive empiricism incorporates a correspondence notion of truth for those beliefs that relate to observables, but advocates a lower epistemic standard of empirical adequacy for beliefs which involve unobservable theoretical entities.
