Talk:Ernan McMullin

Notability

Prof McMullin has been a full prof and chair of dept at a major university, and visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Cape Town, the University of California at Los Angeles, Princeton, and Yale. He has written many books and has 26,200 ghits!

I didn't see the attempt to speedy-delete this, but it must have been bizarre. He's an important figure, and the sources and evidence for that are in the article. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 09:59, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

McMullin's Noteworthy Accomplishment

This encyclopedia article does not inform Wikipedia readers why Father McMullin deserves an encyclopedia article, namely his achievement: a Roman Catholic philosophy of science that addresses modern physics and that is also consistent with the views of the Vatican and (undoubtedly) the Pontifical Institute at the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain, Belgium.

Father McMullin’s doctoral dissertation at Louvain construes the quantum theory in physics in terms of “operational definitions.” Later in his “The Motive for Metaphor” in Proceedings American Catholic Philosophical Association (55 1982 Pp. 27-39), in his "Case for Scientific Realism" in Scientific Realism (ed. Leplin, 1984), and in his Construction and Constraint (ed. McMullin, 1988, P. 234) he says that scientific theories like quantum theory are realistic only in the sense that they are metaphorical models. In "Case for Scientific Realism" he compares the scientist’s metaphor to a poet’s metaphor (P. 31), and also says that he does not think that acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true (P. 35). He thus rejects the prevailing scientific realism, i.e. the thesis that scientific theories are not merely metaphors, but are empirically warranted literal descriptions of reality – realism enabled by the prevailing contemporary pragmatist theses of relativized semantics and ontological relativity.

Clearly if science is merely metaphor that does not deliver truth, then it cannot compete with the truth of Catholicism, and his philosophy is thus consistent with the Aristotelian-Thomistic theology, which is still fundamental to Catholicism. For example the theology of the Eucharist explained as the dogma of transubstantiation by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica (Pt. III, Q. 75) and reaffirmed at length in 1965 by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Mysterium Fidei (Sections 18, 19, 46), is a Catholic dogma based on the Aristotelian-Thomistic ontology of instantiated substances and appearing accidents. Furthermore Pope John Paul II condemned relativism in 1993 in his Veritas Splendor encyclical. And so too did Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2005 in his homily to the College of Cardinals on the eve of his elevation to Pope Benedict XVI, when he denounced the “dictatorship of relativism.”

But the Aristotelian-Thomistic ontology of substance is inconsistent with the pragmatist thesis of ontological relativity that enables literal scientific realism. Heisenberg had discussed the practice of ontological relativity in “Theory of Relativity” (p. 114) in his Physics and Philosophy (1958), where he describes its use by Einstein to develop special theory of relativity, and in “History of Quantum Theory” (p. 42) in the same book, where he describes its use by Heisenberg himself to develop the indeterminacy relations in quantum theory. Quine later characterized this practice in “Ontological Relativity” in his Ontological Relativity (1969), where he recognized it as a universal characteristic of human language.

With less complexity than the dualisms in the elaborate philosophies of Pierre Duhem and Jacques Maritain, Father McMullin’s simple literal-metaphor dualism effectively sequesters the language of modern scientific theory from both ontological relativism and orthodox Catholicism. Father McMullin’s new Catholic philosophy of science and his academic renown have given him an iconic stature comparable to Jacques Maritain.

Father McMullin has given good Catholics a philosophy of science they can accept in good conscience. I would like to see the University of Notre Dame’s famous Jacques Maritain Center renamed the Maritain-McMullin Center, to enable and encourage Notre Dame philosophy graduates to go teach Father McMullin’s new Catholic philosophy of science in other Catholic universities.66.240.59.231 15:18, 20 September 2007 (UTC)Thomas J. Hickey

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