"instead we find a single reference to a contemporary work in that area — namely, ‘Mark Lange’s article ‘‘Structural Realism’’ in the online Stanford Encyclopedia’ (p. 5). Since Marc (that’s ‘Marc’) Lange is not a structural realist, and it James Ladyman who wrote said Stanford article, one can only assume it is the latter’s piece that McGinn has in mind here. (One also cannot help but assume, of course, that he never actually bothered to read it.)
For all the epistemic faux-modesty that this book purports to defend, the image that persists while grinding through its pages is of an individual ludicrously fancying themselves as uniquely positioned to solve the big questions for us, from scratch and unassisted, as if none of the rest of us working in the field have had anything worth a damn to contribute. It will however be clear by now that I take the reality to be substantially different. For me, then, the one pertinent question this work raises is why all of this went unrecognized: this book, after all, issues not from one of the many spurious publishing houses currently trolling graduate students, but Oxford University Press — a press whose stated aim is to ‘publish works that further Oxford University ’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education’. So why did they publish this? I can hazard no explanation other than that Colin McGinn is a ‘big name’; and if that is sufficient for getting work this farcical in print with OUP, then shame on our field as a whole. As such, McGinn’s foray into philosophy of physics may in the end provoke a worthwhile discussion,
though sadly one focused on concerns rather different from those he himself had in mind.
For all the epistemic faux-modesty that this book purports to defend, the image that persists while grinding through its pages is of an individual ludicrously fancying themselves as uniquely positioned to solve the big questions for us, from scratch and unassisted, as if none of the rest of us working in the field have had anything worth a damn to contribute. It will however be clear by now that I take the reality to be substantially different. For me, then, the one pertinent question this work raises is why all of this went unrecognized: this book, after all, issues not from one of the many spurious publishing houses currently trolling graduate students, but Oxford University Press — a press whose stated aim is to ‘publish works that further Oxford University ’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education’. So why did they publish this? I can hazard no explanation other than that Colin McGinn is a ‘big name’; and if that is sufficient for getting work this farcical in print with OUP, then shame on our field as a whole. As such, McGinn’s foray into philosophy of physics may in the end provoke a worthwhile discussion,
though sadly one focused on concerns rather different from those he himself had in mind.
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