The discussion on the success of science in this context centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories.
Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables, as opposed to instrumentalism.
[2]: 70 Bas van Fraassen in his book The Scientific Image (1980) developed constructive empiricism as an alternative to realism.
[3] Responses to van Fraassen have sharpened realist positions and led to some revisions of scientific realism.
For example, a scientific realist would argue that science must derive some ontological support for atoms from the outstanding phenomenological success of all the theories using them.
Thus, it is argued that the best explanation—the only explanation that renders the success of science to not be what Hilary Putnam calls "a miracle"—is the view that our scientific theories (or at least the best ones) provide true descriptions of the world, or approximately so.
[5] Bas van Fraassen replies with an evolutionary analogy: "I claim that the success of current scientific theories is no miracle.
(The Scientific Image, 1980) Some philosophers (e.g. Colin Howson) have argued that the no miracles argument commits the base rate fallacy.
[6] Pessimistic induction, one of the main arguments against realism, argues that the history of science contains many theories once regarded as empirically successful but which are now believed to be false.
Additionally, the history of science contains many empirically successful theories whose unobservable terms are not believed to genuinely refer.