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.
I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.
I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.
So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.
"The nature of being", "ontology", "it calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean".
Science is not about the search for meaning, it's about describing and understanding the physical and natural world. Meaning is up to you, and me, and everyone else.
Asimov was not talking about meaning.
It's easy to see that he wasn't, because nobody would make the categorical statement that there's unequivocal progress in the search for meaning, because meaning is such a cultural (and personal) thing. Meaning is not scientific, and is highly subjective. I wouldn't even know how to measure meaning. Self-reporting? Chemically measured happiness? What.
Had the English professor complained "we think we know so much, yet we're so ignorant about what it all means! People are so unfulfilled, live such empty lives! Wake up, sheeple!" I bet Asimov would have... -- well, he probably would have had humorous words for that too, but his argument would have been different.
When I say that most people think there is more to the world than measurement, I don't mean art or love or whatever. I mean that most people think that the world is made up of things that exist whether we measure them or not, things which have their own nature which we somehow can understand. The purely instrumental thinker says we can't understand those things, we only have measurements and mathematical expressions that relate measurements.
If you have a purely instrumentalist view of reality, where, as I said, your so-called knowledge is actually just a model of an unknown thing which you employ to predict the measurements you read out against a ruler or on a meter or something, then yes, we've made progress exactly of the kind you describe.
But I was trying to make a point about epistemology and ontology. Physics has actually been pretty catastrophic for ontology. I don't think its wrong to say that from the point of view of physics we simply do not know what anything actually is.
> I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.
Yes. But this is a fairly radical position historically and philosophically. Most people would say that there is more to existence than measurement and I while I share your instrumentalist sympathies, like most physicists, I don't see the philosophical case that we can have a consistent worldview if we denounce all knowledge not related to measurement as a total non-starter.
Think about what instrumentalism really means. When you utter the sentence the earth is an oblate spheroid, you are actually making an incredibly complicated set of statements about the outcomes of experiments. If we take the instrumentalist view the measurement doesn't actually tell us the earth is an oblate spheroid - it just tells us that if we make a series of measurements then they come out in such a way as to be concordant with a model of the earth as an oblate spheroid. Are you really prepared to give up the idea that the earth is a thing you can know about?
I actually rather think physics strongly encourages us to adopt the instrumentalist view, primarily because it seems so clear that physics has a local character. In GR there simply is no state of affairs whatever about what is happening "right now" except at the point in spacetime where you make a measurement. Really think about what that means. If we are standing at the north pole and make a measurement of some kind, how can it pertain to the earth as a distributed object in space when we know GR says there is no state of affairs pertaining to that object at the moment of the measurement?
GR tells us all about what the outcome of various measurements will be, but it also calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean. The instrumentalist is committed to the idea that the only thing we can talk about is the results of measurements. What the measurements operate on is just not something we can know. I think that's weird. Physicists often conflate their mathematical models with reality and that lets them think an instrumentalist view is sufficient: the measurements coming out such and such a way is taken as evidence that the universe is filled with objects consistent with the model. But that association is non-trivial in modern physics.