[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:49:22 +0000 (GMT)
--- 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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