Cunning rascal! The materialists do all the work, and you sit back enjoying it and murmuring Agreeable experience, this ...
Actually some of the greatest physicists of the 20th century were pragmatists, like Neils Bohr.
Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Physics
Also see modern work on the topic,
How Pragmatism Reconciles Quantum Mechanics With Relativity etc -
Excerpt:-
3:AM: So does your pragmatism at work in these two cases mean that we should think of quantum mechanics as a realist or an instrumentalist theory or is it a middle way?
RH: Too often contemporary philosophers apply the terms
‘realism’ and ‘instrumentalism’ loosely in evaluating a position, as in the presumptive insult “Oh, that’s just instrumentalism!” Each term may be understood in many ways, and applied to many different kinds of things (theories, entities, structures, interpretations, languages, ….). I once characterized my pragmatist view of quantum mechanics as presenting a middle way between realism and instrumentalism. But by adopting one rather than another use of the terms ‘realism’ and ‘instrumentalism’ one can pigeon hole my view under either label.
In this pragmatist view, quantum probabilities do not apply only to results of measurements. This distinguishes the view from any Copenhagen-style instrumentalism according to which the Born rule assigns probabilities only to possible outcomes of measurements, and so has nothing to say about unmeasured systems. An agent may use quantum mechanics to adjust her credences concerning what happened to the nucleus of an atom long ago on an uninhabited planet orbiting a star in a galaxy far away, provided only that she takes this to have happened in circumstances when that nucleus’s quantum state suffered suitable environmental decoherence.
According to one standard usage, instrumentalism in the philosophy of science is the view that a theory is merely a tool for systematizing and predicting our observations. For the instrumentalist, nothing a theory supposedly says about unobservable structures lying behind but responsible for our observations should be considered significant. Moreover, instrumentalists characteristically explain this alleged lack of significance in semantic or epistemic terms: claims
about unobservables are meaningless, reducible to statements about observables, eliminable from a theory without loss of content, false, or (at best) epistemically optional even for one who accepts the theory. My pragmatist view makes no use of any distinction between observable and unobservable structures, so to call it instrumentalist conflicts with this standard usage.
In this view, quantum mechanics does not posit novel, unobservable structures corresponding to quantum states, observables, and quantum probabilities; these are not physical structures at all. Nevertheless, claims about them in quantum mechanics are often perfectly significant, and many are true. This pragmatist view does not seek to undercut the semantic or epistemic status of such claims, but to enrich our understanding of their non-representational function within the theory and to show how they acquire the content they have.
There is a widespread view that the role of the wave-function (or more general mathematical object) is to represent a novel physical structure—the quantum state—whose existence is evidenced by the theory’s success. In this view, a wave-function represents a physical structure that either exists independently of the more familiar physical systems to which claims about positions, spin etc. pertain or else grounds their existence and properties. From this realist perspective, it may seem natural to label as instrumentalist any approach opposed to that account of the quantum state. But a pragmatist should concede the reality of the quantum state; its existence follows trivially from the truth of quantum claims ascribing quantum states to systems. What he should deny is that quantum state ascriptions are true independently of or prior to the true magnitude claims that (in his view) back them. A more radical pragmatist would reject the representationalist presupposition of this realist/instrumentalist dilemma: the assumption that mere representation is both a (key) function of a novel element of theoretical structure and figures centrally in an account of its content. The truth of a quantum state ascription trivially implies that a wave-function represents something, much as the truth of ‘1+ 1=2’ implies that ‘1’ represents the number one. By eschewing a ‘thicker’ notion of representation, this more radical pragmatist could seek to undermine the view that representation of a tolerably insubstantial sort could either be a non-perspectival function of an element of theoretical structure or usefully appealed to in an account of its content. I’m not presently convinced you have to be so radical to understand the significance of the quantum revolution!
