essentialism.

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21This Cartesian theory of causality is of decisive importance for the whole history of physics. It led to the principle
of action by contact, and later to the more abstract 'principle of actionat vanishing distances' (as I may call
it), of an action propagated from each point to its immediate vicinity; i.e. to the principle of differential equations.
22Newton was an essentialist for whom gravity was not acceptable as an ultimate explanation, but he was
unsuccessful in his attempts to explain it further mathematically. Descartes, in such a situation, would have
postulated the existence of some push-mechanism: he would have proposed what he called a 'hypothesis'. But
Newton, with a critical allusion to Descartes, said that, in this situation, he was not going to invent arbitrary ad
hoc hypotheses (hypotheses non fingo). Of course, he could not but operate constantly with hypotheses (e.
g. with an atomistic theory of light 'rays'); but this saying of his has been interpreted as an authoritative criticism of
the method of hypotheses, or (by Duhem) as a declaration of his instrumentalism.

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According to essentialism we must distinguish between (i) the universe of essential reality, (ii) the universe of
observable phenomena, and (iii) the universe of descriptive language or of symbolic representation. I will take each of
these to be represented by a square.

The function of a theory may here be described as follows.

a, b are phenomena; A, B are the corresponding realities behind these appearances; and α, β the descriptions or
symbolic representations of these realities. E are the essential properties of A, B, and e is the theory describing E.
Now from ε and α we can deduce β; this means that we can explain, with the help of our theory, why a leads to, or is
the cause of, b.

A representation of instrumentalism can be obtained from this schema simply by omitting (i), i.e. the universe of the
realities behind the various appearances. α then directly describes a, and β directly describes b; and ε describes
nothing--it is merely an instrument which helps us to deduce β from α. (This may be expressed by saying--as Schlick
did, following Wittgenstein--that a universal law or a theory is not a proper statement but rather 'a rule, or a set of
instructions, for the derivation of singular statements from other singular statements'. 23 )

This is the instrumentalist view. In order to understand it better we may again take Newtonian dynamics as an