The blog post is here. The gist of it (but do read it, it's very elegantly done!) is that our two physicist colleagues are re-inventing the wheel Vienna Circle:
Like Carnap then, and like Hume before him, Hawking and Mlodinow seem to think that the world of common sense is a kind of theoretical construct that is developed in each of us, in the brain, or in the mind, on the basis of the data in the sensory stimulation that bombards us.
They are in good company, to be sure. But to judge from the text, Hawking and Mlodinow don't seem to have any sense of the history, the pre-history, or indeed the lively present of the ideas they are tossing around. Model-dependent realism is not an up-to-date physics solution to a problem once relegated to philosophy; it's a rehash of philosophical ideas whose real interest seems to elude the authors.
I'm often reminded of Keynes's famous quip in such matters: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
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