Notre Dame Books

This is without doubt the worst book about Notre Dame football I have ever tried to read. My wife, who is not a college football crazy, knows more than this author about ND football. This book should be read by any young child trying to get an elementary grasp on the golden dome game and should not be read by anyone else. It certainly cannot be meant to be read by any true Irish fan! If you had a rating of 0 stars available, I would have assigned it to this total waste of time read.

It is poor example of journalism and contains bad grammer

Werner Heisenberg's Copenhagen interpretation of modern quantum theory has long been the majority view. It includes two theses: 1) the wave/particle duality thesis that wave and particle are two manifestations of one and the same entity, and 2) the scientific realism thesis that the theory is literally descriptive of microphysical reality.

This book's editors, Cushing (a physicist) and a Reverend McMullin (a philosopher), both members of the University of Notre Dame faculty, dissent from the majority view. Cushing rejects the Copenhagen interpretation, and the Reverend McMullin rejects the realist thesis.

In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen ("EPR") proposed a hypothetical experiment to demonstrate the present quantum theory's incompleteness by showing that it implies action at a distance, which the three co-authors (EPR) viewed as absurd.

In 1964 Bell published his locality inequality, and in 1982 Aspect, Dalibard, and Roger implemented the actual EPR experiment with an outcome that corroborated the Copenhagen interpretation by violating Bell's inequality.

Based on their articles in this book I see the Reverend McMullin as clearly the junior partner of the two editors of this book. The Reverend's contribution is typical of his other writings - merely a recitation of some well-known pre-twentieth-century history, in this case about the idea of action at a distance.

Quine once quipped that people take up philosophy either because they like philosophy or because they like history. Quine is clearly among the former, and I place the Reverend McMullin among the latter.

Some of the articles are reprints, but two original works are those by the physicists Teller and Howard. They postulate "holism." But holism means little to physicists except as a name for what has already been described by their experimental findings and physical theory.

I believe that it is better just to let the theory speak for itself in its own terms, and to accept it as a literal and realistic description. Such scientific realism is what Quine calls "ontological relativity."

The book's title notwithstanding the historic philosophical consequences of quantum theory have not been discussed in this book. They are the emergence of the contemporary pragmatist philosophy of language and of science, which include the thesis of ontological relativity. The two editors seem to me to bring a nineteenth-century philosophy to quantum theory.

Google my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci with free downloads by chapter.

Thomas J. Hickey

I found these essays in honor of the Reverend Ernan McMullin a curious collection. The Reverend received his Ph.D. in the 1950's from the Roman Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. The three editors are or were Notre Dame University faculty members, and as I recall, two of them had been hired while the Reverend was philosophy department chairman. The contributors are described in the book as the Reverend's good friends; they are Cartwright, Fine, MacKinnon, Grunbaum, Giere, Laudan, Mendell, Quinn and van Frassen.

While a graduate student in his "Philosophy of Physics" class, I encountered the Reverend's positivist thesis that quantum theory is interpreted by operationalist definitions. I was a realist and a doubting Thomas. Later in a book titled Scientific Realism (1984) I read the Reverend's "Case for Scientific Realism" - that quantum theory is metaphorical rather than descriptive - which I see as nothing but a case of stealth positivism cloaked in vague verbiage. I am still a doubting Thomas: A metaphor is a linguistic novelty, and quantum theory is no longer novel. And if it ever was a metaphor, it has long since become a dead metaphor, which is to say no longer a metaphor, because it is now literal and descriptive for physicists.

Furthermore the Reverend's nondescriptive-realism thesis is self-contradictory; to be realist is to claim to describe reality. I view the Reverend's rejection of descriptive quantum theory as a latter day variation on the Pope's rejection of Galileo's descriptive heliocentric theory. I am amazed that a Roman Catholic priest who accepts the oxymoronic phrase "virgin birth" as literally descriptive, rejects quantum theory as literally descriptive. Quantum theory is one of the most successful theories in the history of physics! The Reverend's attempt to square the circle with his nondescriptive realism reminds me of Veblen's "vendible imponderables", although I doubt that this imponderable is vendible to professional academic philosophers.

The ascendant philosophy of science today is the contemporary pragmatism, which emerged by reflection on quantum theory. This new pragmatism enables scientific realism by a new philosophy of language that relativizes both semantics and ontology to what Quine called our "web of beliefs".

The essays in this McMullin book are not of uniform quality, but I could find no more appreciation for contemporary pragmatism in any of these essays than in the Reverend's own views, which may be why these authors were selected. I see this as a book of marginalized and anachronistic thinking.

For a more contemporary philosophy of science Google my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci for free downloads by chapter, and also read my other reviews at this Amazon site.

Thomas J. Hickey

This book is full of typos and misprints. For examples, in the following pages: 27, 33, 53, 54, 55, 56, 64, 66, 80 and 97, you could find many errors in the formulae.
Some suggestions/amendments are quite naive. Just one example, in p.54, it was said that 'I would claim therefore that the positive instance criterion applies regardless of how P(Fa/h) and P(Fa) are related to one another, except where the positive instance constitutes disconfirmatory or nonconfirmatory evidence for a hypothesis implied by h" The author seems to be forgetting that h also implies h itself. The suggestion is totally nonsense!

I tried ordering this two volume set, but they only sent me volume 2. So, I tried again. Same result. I called Amazon about the problem, and they simply refused to carry through the order. Don't waste your time. There are so many other, more profitable things out there to get aggravated about, after all. . . .