Talk:Instrumentalism/Archive 2

J. Fagg Foster
I found this website [] and I noticed that the Definitions of Key Terms is filled with patent nonsense. I suppose it could be simply personal ramblings that weren't meant to be taken seriously, and what he taught Tool and others wouldn't be complete nonsense either, but the source, Value Theory and Economic Progress: The Institutional Economics of J. Fagg Foster, for the section that I deleted is about scientific inquiry within economics and so could not have a wide audience. Hence, it doesn't seem that any wisdom about instrumentalism, good or otherwise, within it would necessarily be sufficiently notable enough (outside of the economics it addresses) to be encyclopedic. Furthermore, the section was unencyclopedic. For instance the section's concluding remark that: "In short, Tool shows that Foster consistently applied the four premises constituting instrumentalism, but would not have accepted the caption 'instrumentalism' or "technology" to identify his pattern of inquiry." Tool shows what according to who? See we do not have an authorship for these observations regarding what Tool shows other than User:TBR-qed and we are not supposed to publish are own work here. --Modocc (talk) 21:58, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Removal of User:TBR-qed's original research needed
User:TBR-qed's original research (OR), which still compromises most of the current state of this article, needs to be removed. By OR I mean TBR-qed's analysis of others' works which he does repeatedly with supporting quotes to back his synthesis (each time he is drawing conclusions connected with related works) in contravention of Wikipedia content policies. -Modocc (talk) 13:45, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I continue to think that most of my rewritten article conforms to the policy: "Articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to reach or imply a conclusion not clearly stated by the sources themselves." We need other editors to comment on whether your interpretation of my policy violations is correct or not.TBR-qed (talk) 18:01, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I vote for deleting this entire article. It's obvious it's someone's paper they wrote for a college class. I would have given it a C- if I was still teaching philosophy: Popper was a scientific realist; Dewey was the paradigmatic pragmatist. Instrumentalism is simply the doctrine that scientific theories shouldn't be taken as literally referring to physically real entities, as scientific terms are purported by instrumentalists to be mere logical constructs, tools for organizing perceived phenomena. We're better off with just a stub that said just that. Warren Platts (talk) 13:42, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Your global condemnation is irrelevant to supporting modocc’s accusation of original research, and violates the rule of civility.TBR-qed (talk) 21:03, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Dude, I have just got done reading through the history of this article. You and MadScientist have taken a pretty decent article and turned it into a pile of crap. There is no other way to describe it. I am going to revert the article back to where it was on July 2014, and Modoc and I'll take it from there. You need to walk away from this article. It is obvious you are in over your head.Warren Platts (talk) 03:41, 15 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I found this in the talk page archive that expresses my point better than I could:


 * Im sorry, but we dont need someone with no knowledge of instrumentalism coming here and editing. We dont need you going and doing homework now and clouding the article and suppressing facts. Any scientific epistemology which is based on a criticism of causality or A priori principles can be seen as related to instrumentalism. Ive been reading you Madscientist, and what ive been reading is you basically challenging well known concepts and having trouble making sense of basic sentences. Whatever you do, dont take a shot at rewriting the article, please. Underterminism is related to instrumentalism in that both are skeptical to knowledge due to the problem of induction. Both schools are skeptical of a priori justifications. If your actually going to deny the fallaciousness of induction then your going to have to destroy 2 milllenia worth of scientific foundation. Induction is an informal, rather than formal fallacy, since induction can never prove with 100% certainty, and takes for granted the gap in between premise and conclusion. The past comments youve made are really nothing more than you having trouble understanding concepts on a page your trying to edit. Your also making baseless claims and trying to argue against concepts with your own justifications. " It just seems like an obvious result of using the experimental method. For example you can go back to Ptolemy and Copernicus. Up to a point the two theories fit the data more or less equally well." --madscientist "Can anyone paraphrase in simple English what this actually means? The only sense I can make out of it is that he is saying that since at times data may have two different theoretical interpretations any scientific conclusion is a fallacy. Which I think is clearly nonsense." --madscientist You keep saying what "i think", when talking about the article. Its not about what " i think" or what "we think". On wikipedia, We need to give the facts- both sides of the story- and talk through academics and scholars and cited material, not through ourselves. Im sorry if i sound harsh, its just that i really do hate it when information and knowledge is suppressed unfairly.


 * The point im trying to make is that when we come across an article which does not meet acceptable standards, don't start going an an edit frenzy. Just take it easy and let some senior editors take over, or editors with more knowledge in the area. If you are hesitant and dubious of your own understanding, dont do homework halfway through your edit, just leave it be.Saintobalys (talk) 18:56, 24 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Warren Platts (talk) 03:46, 15 November 2015 (UTC)


 * And then you write things like "WOW. That destroys my whole article. I hope I can have some time to rethink, because the article I replaced was completely inadequate." That is so wrong. Number one: you do not own any articles on Wikipedia. Nobody does. This is not your article. Number two: the article you replaced was an order of magnitude better than with that which you have replaced it with, to put it politely. The current article isn't about instrumentalism.... Warren Platts (talk) 03:52, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

I am finally deleting this warning as unwarranted.TBR-qed (talk) 17:01, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

bias?
Even though i am not well informed on the subject, i find it very hard to believe that something along the lines of:

Physicists knew better, but, busy developing the Standard Model, were so steeped in developing quantum field theory, that their talk, largely metaphorical, perhaps even metaphysical, was unintelligible to the public, while the steep mathematics warded off philosophers of physics.

could be said to be unbiased (even if it is from a citation). This page seems to me to assume that Instrumentalism is basically true. Which is funny, because i do believe it is, but i also believe that this is a fringe view or at least not consensus. For example, Bourget and Chalmers claim in "What Do Philosophers Believe?" that in an online quiz 81.6% of respondents identified themselves with "non-skeptical realism" which would seems to be a rejection of instrumentalism, IMHO.

I am not sure how to deal with that. MarcioRPS (talk) 19:40, 3 September 2018 (UTC) (my page is in the portuguese wiki, sorry)

Original synthesis
Please tell me specifically which "recent changes turned article into essay, and how your replacement can justify completely eliminating John Dewey.TBR-qed (talk) 19:39, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * You replaced a fairly accurate article (which was based on Torretti's (1999) book) with a personal essay. The attribution of instumentalism to Dewey was correct—I restored his name a month ago. There is a pattern you follow when you create Wikipedia articles which is highly problematic, if not unacceptable. You choose a few philosophers that have written on the topic (not even the most representative or even relevant ones) and you cite long quotes from either their works or from secondary literature and then you compare these philosophers' views upon the given topic and draw sweeping conclusions. Thus you violate WP:SYNTH/WP:NOR. This style of writing is good for academic essays (apart from the excessive quoting), but inappropriate for Wikipedia. Furthermore, Wikipedians are supposed to improve upon fairly good articles and make them good/excellent, not replace them with their own versions, especially if the new text is worse than the old one. If you want to add Dewey to the existing article, please feel free to do so, but please avoid original synthesis. --Omnipaedista (talk) 20:44, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * It seems to me that we are debating a fundamental issue about the scope and purpose of Wikipedia. I accept your observation that the article I replaced might have been accurate from a philosophical or history of thought point of view.  I replaced it because I found it totally inadequate from a social science point of view.  Given this distinction, would an appropriate Wikipedia article simply embrace both points of view?  Or could one argue that, as a non-specialist encyclopedia, Wikipedia should favor articles more concerned with the social significance of a topic like instrumentalism, essentially ignoring specialized philosophic and history of thought content.  Did the founders of Wikipedia debate that point?  Should it be debated now?TBR-qed (talk) 22:01, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, instrumentalism used to be a strictly philosophical topic (it began as such and it shaped contemporary philosophy of science). Emphasis should definitely be given to the use of the term in philosophy. The article could of course include sections on how the term is used outside philosophy, but this must be done in an NPOV way. Wikipedia mirrors academic literature and gives due weight to each piece of information (see WP:UNDUE). --Omnipaedista (talk) 05:27, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'll mull all this and get back to you.TBR-qed (talk) 12:41, 19 October 2018 (UTC)
 * NOR rules are clearly written, but I find the synthesis part confusing. Please tell me how I volate in two examples.  1) I open "Instrumentalism" quoting Dewey & Popper as primary sources necessary to explain current usage of the label.  I then document current conflicting usage by social scientists.  Is this inappropriate synthesis or refocusing the topic?  2)I open "Instrumental and value rationality" with Weber's definitions of those terms, and then demonstrate that Rawls and Nozick mostly ignore Weber's labels but discuss the same topic with new labels.  Is this inappropriate synthesis?  If so, how can one identify careless word usage?TBR-qed (talk) 14:55, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Absent any sources that describe the purported relations among all these thinkers in this way, your version of the article was improper synthesis. Your style of writing is quite appropriate for academic essays (that is exactly how good essays are written in an academic context), but grossly inappropriate for Wikipedia. You definitely cannot use statements like "demonstrating that neither philosopher's judgments have achieved universal assent" and "This article shows..." You cite Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth to support your personal views. I personally consider this work as one of the most notable attacks on instrumentalism ever written. Personal views aside, Wikipedians are not supposed to act like experts who offer their opinions, even when they are experts in real life. Wikipedians are not supposed to take sides in genuine controversies (no one can seriously claim that that the realism–instrumentalism debate is over), carry out research programs, conduct original research, judge the quality of experts' opinions. However, that is exactly what you did in several articles, most notably in Instrumental and value rationality, Instrumental and value-rational action, Instrumental and intrinsic value, Fact–value distinction, Instrumentalism, and Natural kind. 131.111.185.45 reverted your edits to 'Fact–value distinction' and I reverted your edits to 'Instrumentalism'. I did not revert your edits to 'Instrumental and value rationality', 'Instrumental and value-rational action', 'Instrumental and intrinsic value', and 'Natural kind' merely because the previous versions of these articles were of dismal quality. --Omnipaedista (talk) 15:30, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
 * This section is a good example of a neutral exposition of a highly contested subject in philosophy. --Omnipaedista (talk) 15:40, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm reflecting on your comments, and trying to learn why Horkheimer is so important for understanding instrumental reason.TBR-qed (talk) 19:10, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

(outdent) Thank you for your integrity defending Wikipedia against endless violation of its rules, and for your industriousness identifying violations you think I am committing. Given the massiveness of your charges, I want to explain in individual articles my reasons for believing I am not in violation, starting with “Instrumentalism.” I assumed that this article should mostly explain the current definition and significance of that term, rather than give a history of its use. “The “right definition of a Term may be a useful step in the explication of our conceptions … [for] that which alone makes it worthwhile [to clarify a conception] is the opportunity of using it [as an instrument] in the expression of Truth.” (Whewell in Torretti, 219)  See instrumentalism talk page.TBR-qed (talk) 17:42, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Why my article improved on original and my article's replacement
Continuing discussion on Omnipaedista's talk page here is my reasoning when replacing original. I assumed that this article should mostly explain the current definition and significance of instrumentalism, rather than give a history of its use. Reading the present replacement of my article and the article I replaced, I judge them to be biased by oversight. Both are mostly history of thought presented in the European and physicist realism-antirealism frame of debate, which makes instrumentalism a form of anti-realism. Both ignore the possibility of a position that is at once anti-realist and anti-idealist/empiricist/inductivist. Inductively lumping instrumentalism into the latter camp of discredited schools ignores the active presence of that third position, represented by John Dewey’s unique instrumentalism in the mid 20th century. It violates NPOV. Given this oversight, I tried to craft an article that explains current ambiguity of the label. I traced it to the unresolved conflict between definitions by Dewey and Popper in the 1930, which I document is still the heart of modern debate in the social sciences. I did not consider modern realist/anti-realist debates in physics, but would not object to including sources (Horkheimer) and modern examples of that debate—discussed by Torretti but never identified with a school labeled instrumentalist. My article did not violate NPOV because I present Dewey and Popper contrary positions equally, as well as positions of modern followers of each. My article did not violate NOR because I have been aware of this debate as it went on. My approach did not cherry-pick or synthesize elements I chose, but reported elements present throughout the debate. Please tell me which parts of this reasoning you still contest, or allow me to restore my article and help me craft more neutral-sounding expressions if you find some grating.TBR-qed (talk) 17:38, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Three editors here (,, and me) opined that your version violates WP:NOR. If you still believe it does not, I suggest you start an RFC. Please see also WP:OWN. --Omnipaedista (talk) 18:21, 24 October 2018 (UTC)