Yes, that's true: "half-life" is an intuitive concept, but that's so precisely because it's an informal metaphor. Are the molecules "alive"? No, so I should probably have said something in the article about how scientists obviously understand things, just like everyone else does or else we couldn't function. But the question is whether that understanding follows just from scientific methods, or whether scientists are doing nonscientific thinking on the side to supplement their maps and quantifications. You see this in scientism: physicists especially condescend to philosophers while simultaneously presupposing a juvenile philosophy.

I've added a few paragraphs to the bottom of the section on equations, to draw this distinction in the article.