[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical points
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:22:55 +0800
Eric Dean wrote:
"I think it's reasonable to conclude that among the normal meanings of
"all men are mortal" are meanings that at least imply that for every
human there will come a time when that human is dead."
If the word 'mortal' is to tell us something interesting about any
particular example within the set of 'all men', then the sentence "all
men are mortal" cannot be formalized with the proposition "For all x,
if x is a man then there exists a time t such that x dies at t".
There is of course the obviously problematic 'there exists', which
should be a conversation stopper. Beyond that, it is difficult to see
how picking a highly idiosyncratic 'meaning' of a sentence (i.e. that
mortality refers to a point in time), providing a highly idiosyncratic
formalization (i.e. 'scientific') of that 'meaning', gives one grounds
for deciding whether that sentence is or is not scientific. Put
differently, under such particular conditions, I can imagine ruling
out any sentence as being a scientific hypothesis. After all, what
sentence could not render peculiar 'meanings' that would render them
unscientific?
Sincerely,
Phil Enns
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
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