[glenstein]

It must be the case that our measurements are interfacing with something ontologically real, so I can't agree with the minimizing tone that treats respect for them them as implicitly necessitating a total exclusion of ontology. Far from breaking the link between measurement and reality, examples like GR’s localism or QM’s treatment of particles show that measurement is what pushes us into new and unfamiliar ontological commitments.

To then suggest that Asimov's essay depends on such a radical version of instrumentalism feels unnecessary, given that his argument attaches just as well, I would say better, to a view that makes space for ontology but still underwrites the history of progress he was describing. His essay seems less a failure to follow deeper philosophical detours than a decision to keep his argument tied to that central point.

You also seem to be implying a kind of ontological "regression" in the history of knowledge which I think comes from projecting specific ontological attitudes retroactively onto the past when those distinctions weren’t even part of the vocabulary.

A big problem with Steven Jay Gould’s self-posturing as a savior of Darwinian theory was that he manufactured a crisis of his own invention about "gradualism" and then claimed to resolve it. Darwin never assumed a fixed speed of evolution, so the supposed crisis dissolves once you stop reading one into the history. A similar attitude helps in reading the history of science: early measurements and models need not be seen as knowledge of ontology that we somehow "lost" but as data accompanied by overconfident declarations that can be separated out.

If you correct for ontology in this way, treating the instruments as interfacing with whatever is ontologically real, then you see steady progress toward more accurate knowledge. Far from being subtly wrong this reinforces the core of Asimov’s point that successive models are increasingly less wrong because they are tethered to reality (e.g flat to globe to spheroid to GR’s spacetime and beyond). It's that same arc of progress carrying us through those examples into more exotic ontologies. And the sense of crisis comes not from instrumentalism's commitments but from identifying progress with 'intuitively familiar' as if outgrowing our conceptual inheritance were failure rather than discovery.

[glenstein]

Long reply already but one more thing. I would go so far as to say that all-out instrumentalism is a way of reading what Kuhn advocated (and perhaps actually what Kuhn believed depending on who you ask), and it was key to him to get away from notions of progress that rely on ontological commitments to external reality. And so a lot of the pushback was to rescue "progress" by insisting on ontological commitments that make the notion of progress make sense. In that light I can't see a way of reading Asimov advocating progress that would commit him to that kind of instrumentalism.