instrumentalism

IPA: ɪnstrʌmˈɛnʌɫɪzʌm

(philosophy) In the philosophy of science, the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments whose worth is measured not by whether the concepts and theories are true or false (or correctly depict reality), but how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena.

Examples of "instrumentalism" in Sentences

There is a second kind of instrumentalism-based value inheritance.
Buddy's masterful multi-instrumentalism and Julie's sugar-cutting vocals ring in the truth.
Buddy\'s masterful multi-instrumentalism and Julie\'s sugar-cutting vocals ring in the truth.
The public discourse is heavily dominated at present by a perception whether welcomed or deprecated of student instrumentalism.
Bartholomew: The trend is towards more focus on fault, less on instrumentalism. eBay explicitly rejected a cheapest cost avoider standard.
An affectual orientation that contrasts with Seabright’s instrumentalism is represented in The Second Marriage by Seabright’s daughter Sophia.
Ironically it's the same kind of instrumentalism favored by Biblical literalists, for whom all the biosphere was created for human satisfaction.
The bill is entirely too clever for its own good, painfully complicated in its tinkering instrumentalism, which in the end would do very little and do it too late, like an impoverished family scrounging for dinner money on the eve of their eviction.
In the case of scientific theories, the basic logical empiricist approaches were variations on the idea of instrumentalism, the view that scientific theories were predictive instruments and that the knowledge they represent is limited to what they predict about the observable properties of observables.