ABSTRACT
Mach’s agnostic attitude to explanation is not unlike that of Osiander, the publisher of Copernicus’ great book of 1543, who in the anonymous preface urged that theories should be judged only by their convenience, and not by their plausibility. This was also the line which the Inquisitors tried to get Galileo to take. It is now generally called instrumentalism, because a theory is seen as an instrument; like any piece of apparatus, it is judged by whether it works, and given up when someone invents a better one. The sciences, on this view, are not concerned with explanation, but with classification and prediction.
