[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical points
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:22:34 +0700
Eric Dean wrote:
"Not so the apodictic (i.e. non-statistical) sense in which Quine and
Popper were using the sentence -- to find out if some man *is*
immortal, you have to wait around an infinite amount of time."
If some man is immortal? What can this possibly mean? Perhaps I have
lost my charitability again but if we are using the primary use of
words, I can make no sense of what an immortal human being would look
like. I have read fictional stories about immortal human beings
where, for example, a person drank from a stream in a forest and from
then on never became sick and or aged. Or there is the Highlander
movie series where extraterrestrial spirits inhabit human bodies which
can then only die if decapitated. But if we are being 'scientific',
how can one imagine the case of an immortal human being in order for
it to be grounds for falsifying the sentence 'All men are mortal'?
Does this immortal person age? If they don't age when did they stop
aging? As a zygote? Upon birth? We, of course, imagine immortal
human beings being in the prime of life, but that would be the prime
of life for a mortal human being. Or if immortal human beings don't
age, what sense is there to the claim of a human being without age?
It is not sufficient to simply associate the ideas 'immortal' and
'human being' in order to come up with something meaningful. No, if
the sense 'All men are mortal' is to have any meaning, it cannot have
the 'apodictic sense' that is being attributed to Quine and Popper.
The idea of an immortal human being is nonsensical and so cannot be
grounds for falsification.
To be charitable, I appreciate the philosophical point about cases
where some future event or discovery may falsify claims being being
made now. This would be the case with black swans and so sentences of
the sort 'All swans are white' should always have the implied caveat
of 'so far as we know'. But 'All humans are mortal' is not of this
sort. Whatever else human beings are, they are mortal, and if they
aren't mortal, I am not sure they are human beings. The idea of an
immortal human being is nonsensical, unlike the idea of a black swan,
which is possible.
There is also something curious about the claim that a sentence is or
is not scientific depending on whether it meets a philosophical
criterion. Wouldn't a sentence, or some form of that sentence, be
scientific if we found it being used by scientists qua scientists in
an established fashion? God help us if we leave the decision of what
is or is not scientific to philosophers like Quine and Popper.
Probably,
Phil Enns
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
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