Expedient or Real

Mr Heine's masterly introduction to "Are scientific constructs expedient or do they have real existence?" is largely summed up in his own words: "Any abstraction inferred from sense-data can be termed a scientific construct, it doesn't really matter which constructs you use to derive hypotheses which are testable." As may be expected, when the meeting an a whole took up the discussion, problems of existence soon reduced it almost to "cogito ergo sum," though Mr Coleridge's remark that "an electron Ls a scientific construct, but little hard bails are an aid to understanding" contains much compressed wisdom.