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.