[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are immortal' unscientific?
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:14:42 +0000 (GMT)
I had written:-
"Actually the question as previously asked is falsifiable. The question should
have been "Is 'All men are immortal' unscientific?" as per above.
Throw in the questions "Is 'All men are fallible' scientific?" and "Is 'All men
are infallible' scientific?", and answer the second "Not on the evidence of
Donal's first attempt at a subject heading", if you feel like it (though
actually it is scientific, just false).
Donal
Not for nothing a fallibilist in the theory of knowledge"
This post was a kind of joke borne of confusion (and to raise some confusions,
so these might be sorted), but has been taken up by Walter with apparent
seriousness and I will address that below. First though, the post is not
serious because from a Popperian POV clearly "All men are immortal" is
falsifiable/scientific (as was made clear by the quotations from Popper and
Quine in the parallel thread, and from the url'd article that prompted it). It
is not only falsifiable (because it may be proved by the death of any man
within a finite time t) but it is amply falsified - by the many deaths of 'men'
(whether or not used here to include women) and such deaths are observable on
any realistic view.
Of course there are ways around any falsification and in this case we can deny
all the apparent observational evidence of men 'being dead' by various devices
such as "He ain't dead, he's just asleep" (copyright Bob Dylan, "Joey") and
denying there are states of 'being alive' or 'being dead'. But not only are
these transparent and anti-scientific 'evasive manouevres' but they do not
affect the underlying philosophical or logical point which is that it is
problematic to regard a proposition as falsifiable when its 'F'-range is
infinite. In the case of "All men are immortal", which is equivalent to saying
there is no example of a man who has died within any finite time t, the F-range
is finite.
Now to Walter's post:-
> As stated, the proposition is ambiguous. The proposition
> could be an empirical
> (scientific) claim or it could be a transcendental claim.
Given the philosophical/logical point at stake (as explained by Popper, Quine
and the article) it is clear what is the sense of the proposition and it is not
ambiguous (though of course it may be rendered ambiguous by another
interpretation, that interpretation will inevitably miss the
philosophical/logical point at stake). As such the proposition is scientific.
> In the former case,
> it makes sense to investigate whether any particular man
> has never died.
This may be a typo where Walter meant "ever" where he wrote "never": because,
while we can investigate whether any man has ever died (within a finite time t)
and an instance of this will falsify the proposition, we cannot investigate
whether there is an example of a man who has "never" died and such an
investigation is (in any case) irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the
proposition. [For reasons given by Popper and Quine].
> In the latter case, the claim says that if you find some
> entity that is mortal,
> it's not possible for that entity to be a man. As a
> transcendental claim, it
> expresses a universal and necessary truth; being outside
> the realm of
> contingency it entails that no empirical inquiry is
> required, or possible.
What Walter calls a "transcendental claim" (somewhat grandly it might be
thought) Popper would call (more prosaically) a "definitional claim": for the
claim is that, by definition, a 'mortal man' is a logically impossible
structure or entity. Walter is right that such a claim is non-empirical - but
it is also somewhat [i.e. entirely] beside the point.
Donal
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