[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:56:22 -0230
Quoting John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 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?
WO: Would this not make phenomenological truth equivalent to universal truth,
and thus, in keeping with our traditional conception of truth?
"Phenomenological research" has been gaining quite a currency in educational
research in the UK, US and Canada. I have never been able to make out how the
research under this rubric is actually "phenomenological." Colleagues insist
that I must know something about this paradigm given my study of the likes of
Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau and Schutz. They are disappointed when I say that I
don't see how their research projects, claimed to be phenomenological, really
are phenomenological. Surely, having a stream of consciousness conversation
with a few people at Starbuck's in the wee hours of the morning does not count
as a phenomenological epoche. Perhaps John W can enlighten us (and explain what
"true for each person" could possibly mean. (If it's anything like "true for me
but false for you," it's surely an incoherent notion.)
Walter O.
MUN
(Yes, we have been blessed with alot of snow .... I mean, ALOT of snow.)
>
> 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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> >
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