An electron is a posit?

I think you're confusing the explanation with what the explanation is an explanation of.

I don't know if scientists have directly observed electrons, but they are apparently able to directly observe their effects through instrumentation.

You mean theoretical, right? Hypothetical implies that they don't exist, right? To say of an entity that it's theoretical doesn't have the same implications of what it would be to say of an entity that it's hypothetical, I think.

PS: Oops. I just noticed you said neutrinos. I don't know how much difference it makes though, as I don't know much about 'em.

I think you're confusing the explanation with what the explanation is an explanation of.

I don't know if scientists have directly observed electrons, but they are apparently able to directly observe their effects through instrumentation.

Electrons are not models. No more than chairs are models. Model of what? Of course, scientists can observe the effect of electrons. Unless they did, they would not posit electrons to explain those effects. In this way, God is a posit. As Aquinas says, we suppose the invisible God to explain the visible universe.

Thank you for that clarification.

I don't rightly know what an explanatory entity is, and to call an electron unobservable is problematic for some people since electrons can be directly observed (through instrumentation). For example, the Cathode Ray Experiment demonstrates that electrons exist--or so it's said.

To posit:
To assume the existence of, a postulate, a conceptual explanation

An electron is a posit. Now what are the properties of an electron.
It is not a point particle, or an entity which follow the laws of classical (Newtonian) mechanics. It is not the inert, insensate, point particle of the mechanistic deterministic form of materialism. Something quite different entirely, something quite fascinating. A collapsed probability waveform, A particle and a wave at the same time, it moves from one orbit to another without passing through the space and time between orbits. Something which can really only be described as a mathematical formula. The modern notion of an electron is not the same as the earlier conception. It is not matter in the traditional sense of the term.

Electrons are not models. No more than chairs are models. Model of what? Of course, scientists can observe the effect of electrons. Unless they did, they would not posit electrons to explain those effects. In this way, God is a posit. As Aquinas says, we suppose the invisible God to explain the visible universe.

Experiments establish the existence of electrons, or rather, electron theory. But there is not direct observation of electrons. They are not only unobserved, but unobservable, since electrons are required in order to make observations. I don't understand what you mean by electrons can be directly observed through instrumentation. You mean like microbes as be observed through a microscope. I think that large molecules can be observed with electron microscopes, but not individual electrons. Explanatory entities are exactly that. They are posited to explain what we directly observe.

Yes. So was that what you were asking? If not, then what?
They are? You mean we can't see them? But their effect can be observed on graphs. For a long time, we could not see germs or microbes either. But they were not made of words and numbers.

Before we could see microbes, they were made of words

If a man with no education concerning microbes were to simply see them through a microscope, he would not see the same microbes we do.

You can't mean this literally. Microbes never were made of words.

Of course he would. He may not know what he is seeing, but he would be seeing the same thing a scientist that knows what he's seeing would see. If someone shows me a laptop, and yet I don't know what laptops are, I would still be seeing the same laptop as the person who showed me. You think that if we do not have knowledge of what something is, that when we see said something, we see something different than what someone else would see that knows what that something is? You can't be serious.

You experience of these microbes is mediated

our experience of them is conditioned by human sensation and human interpretation

You don't experience these microbes in themselves.

Microbes are assembled from data from the senses and the interpretation of this data.

Devoid of consciousness and culture, they would not exist for you, as they do not exist for the dead.

Scientific ideology pretends to a certain skepticism, but tends to inspire a sort of dogmatic resistance to any questioning of its axioms.

It is a posit in the sense it is posited to explain what we observe. But that's all right. To quote Quine, "to posit is not to patronize". Electrons exist. And, "exist" is univocal. I think you are asking whether electrons "really"exist. Let me quell your anxiety. They do.

I'm not sure if scientific non-realists deny the existence of electrons. Do you know?

A scientist non-realist? I didn't even know those existed. Science, I thought, deals only with the real.

In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that a concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality.

In one sense they do, in another, they may not.

See Instrumentalism.

Before we could see microbes, they were made of words. Now they are made of words, numbers, and pictures. Are they "really" there? Sure. But how to they exist for us? The concrete real is reveal by discourse. To contemplate an object in isolation from the perceiving subject is to yank out or abstract the object. The abstraction of natural science has been extremely useful in a practical sense. This usefulness has inspired an ideology of such abstraction. Humans are so used to pretending that objects exist in isolation that they forget that much of what they experience as the object is discourse.

If a man with no education concerning microbes were to simply see them through a microscope, he would not see the same microbes we do. Our experience of microbes is not divorced from our conceptions of microbes, which evolved historically. The concrete real implies history, as the human species had to evolve language and the scientific method and telescopes before these microbes could exist as they do for us. To imagine them independent of an observer is a complicated abstraction that also implies history, as well as a living human being's imagination.

doesn't mean that what we experience isn't real, or is less real in some way. That's the mistake you're making. That because we experience the world with our human senses, we are not experiencing what is real. This is false.

Think about what you're saying. What would experiencing the microbes in themselves even mean? I don't think you even know. But if you do, please explain to me.

I never said it wasn't real. I said that the concrete real is revealed by discourse. On top of that: "real" is a word. It doesn't have some absolute meaning but only varieties of use.