[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?

How about the view that the claim "All men are mortal" is neither scientific nor analytic, but is "phenomenologically" true, that is, true for each person when they examine the structure of their own lives as they live them?
This is the view of William Earle, in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS. He says that examining the way we live our lives reveals that death is "built in." We all have the passion to get things done; we value experiences as unique; we experience development and growth, none of which would happen if we never died. If we never died, our lives would lack passion, uniqueness of experience, and psychological development. 


Donal McEvoy wrote:


--- On Sun, 16/3/08, wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx> wrote:


From: wokshevs@xxxxxx <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Donal McEvoy" <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sunday, 16 March, 2008, 6:56 PM
How's this for a possible mediated resolution to the
dispute? "All men are
mortal" is indeed not a scientific claim given the
sense of "scientific" and
the sense of "mortal" being used by Donal. The
sense of these terms are
legitimate within the specific problematic Quine and Popper
are addressing, and
the questions involved are genuinely philosophical
questions.


This is welcome bar perhaps one point, see below.


But it remains the case that we are justified in believing
that all men are
mortal in a more comprehensive sense of "mortal"
and that all scientists (and
all other rational persons) either believe this too or at
least act as if they
too believed the truth of this claim. 

In a perhaps similar vein Eric Dean wrote:-

The
point to Quine's logical analysis of the sentence is to
highlight the impossibility of falsifying [that meaning of]
the sentence, thereby making clear (it was to be hoped, I
think) why "all men are mortal" doesn't
qualify as a scientific hypothesis.


The caveat is that Quine's and Popper's claims are limited to "All men are 
mortal" per se. That is, if that is all you have by way of theory and the existence 
and death of people is all you have by way of evidence, then it is not scientific. But it 
_may_ take on a scientific character if considered as part of some theoretical framework 
that is itself well-tested: for example theories of cell-death, of how muscle atrophies 
over time, of how organs like the heart (a pump) wear out, of how bone thins, of how the 
body becomes more susceptible to cancers and the like. Embedded in this context, the 
theory _may_ be regarded as _indirectly_testable, and the death of persons in line with 
this theoretical framework may be taken to corroborate the framework and thus the theory 
so embedded.

This goes some way to explain how the claim it is not scientific per se may be squared 
with our common sense intuition that human mortality (as with animal and plant mortality 
- rock mortality, as JLS points out, raises different considerations) is something that 
is borne out by much observational evidence. It is, but not quite in the straightforward 
way that because all known people have died that means "All men are mortal".

This leads on to the issue of how scientific theories relate to overall 
frameworks and how either might be revised in the light of a disconfirmation. 
On this Quine and Popper agree substantially but also disagree crucially. Hey, 
philosophy.

Donal
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