墨笛

（译者按：楷体字部分与现有的陈启伟译本（中国人民大学出版社，2005）大相径庭，陈译放在括号内，以示对照。我的译文可能也仍有错误，甚至也有可能我认为陈译错了的地方恰恰是译对了。欢迎批评指正。）

Chapter One

Language and Truth

第一章        语言和真理

 

 

§1. Beginning with Ordinary Things

§1. 从日常事物开始

（小结：经验主义的根本原则，即关于外间对象的一切知识都来源于感觉经验，无疑是正确的。我们却不能同意贝克莱等古典经验主义者和罗素、卡尔纳普等现代经验主义者的现象主义本体论：真实存在的只是感觉经验，物理对象只是整理感觉经验的工具。经验主义原则说到底是常识和科学的原则，是人们对人这种物理对象的认识活动的一种说明，因此不但不足以据此取消常识和科学上认可的各种对象，而且是以对它们总体上的承认为前提的。诚然，科学是在演化中的，我们的本体论观点有朝一日可能会和现在的观点完全不同，但整个演化过程却是渐进的。所以，我们只能从现在被接受的本体论观点出发展开我们的科学和哲学探究。）

 

This familiar desk manifests its presence by resisting my pressures and by deflecting light to my eyes. Physical things generally, however remote, become known to us only through the effects which they help to induce at our sensory surfaces. Yet our common sense talk of physical things goes forward without benefit of explanations in more intimately sensory terms. Entification begins at arm’s length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimpses. In this there is little cause for wonder. Each of us learns his language from other people, through the observable mouthing of words under conspicuously intersubjective circumstances. Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.

这张熟悉的桌子抵住了我的压力，把光反射到我的眼中，它通过这些方式展示自己的存在。一般地说，物理事物，不管多远或多近，要能为我们所知，都必须通过它作用于我们感觉表面所产生的效果。然而，我们通常在谈起物理事物时，并不借助于更加密切的感觉术语的解释。实体化过程开始于与我们不即不离之处；在最初的概念系统中，被实体化的是感觉到的事物，而不是感觉本身。这一点是不足为奇的。我们每一个人都从别人那里学习语言，方法是在主体间清晰可辨的场合下模仿可以观察得到的发声。从语言的观点看，从而从概念的观点看，处于焦点的事物是那些足够公开从而可以公开谈论的事物，那些足够寻常和清晰从而可以经常谈论的事物，足够接近从而很快能用名字标识和熟识的事物。这些事物是语词最先运用于其上的事物。

（陈译：我们日常对物理事物的谈论并不是借助于解释，而是以直接的感觉的语词进行的。）

（翟评：理解完全错误，但这个错误在读到下一段时应该能纠正过来的：不是物理事物要借感觉性质解释，而是恰恰相反，感觉性质倒是常常要用物理事物解释。）

 

Talk of subjective sense qualities comes mainly as a derivative idiom. When one tries to describe a particular sensory quality, he typically resorts to reference to public things—describing a color as orange or heliotrope, a smell as like that of rotten eggs. Just as one sees his nose best in a mirror, removed to half the optimum focal distance, so also he best identifies his sense data by reflecting them in external objects.

对感觉性质的谈论主要是以派生的方式出现的。当人们试图描述某个特殊的感觉性质时，典型的做法是诉诸公开的事物，例如，把某种颜色描述为橘子的颜色或天芥菜的颜色，把某种气味描述为像臭鸡蛋的气味。正像人只有通过镜子（移至焦点距离的一半）才最能看清自己的鼻子一样，同样，他也只有借助对外部对象的观照才能最好地认清他的感觉材料。

 

Impressed with the fact that we know external things only mediately through our senses, philosophers from Berkeley onward have undertaken to strip away the physicalistic conjectures and bare the sense data. Yet even as we try to recapture the data, in all their innocence of interpretation, we find ourselves depending upon sidelong glances into natural sciences. We may hold, with Berkeley, that the momentary data of vision consist of colors disposed in a spatial manifold of two dimensions; but we come to this conclusion by reasoning from the bidimensionality of the ocular surface, or by noting the illusions which can be engendered by two-dimensional artifacts such as paintings and mirrors, or, more abstractly, simply by noting that the interception of light in space must necessarily take place along a surface. Again we may hold that the momentary data of audition are clusters of components each of which is a function of just two variables, pitch and loudness; but not without knowledge of the physical variables of frequency and amplitude in the stimulating string.

外间的事物，只有通过我们的感官才能间接地为我们所知；这一事实给贝克莱以来的哲学家深刻的印象，他们开始着手去除物理主义的假设，使感觉材料裸化。然而，即使抛开对感觉材料的解释，而只是再现它们，我们也会发现要用到一点自然科学知识才能做到。我们可以像贝克莱一样认为，瞬间的视觉材料由分布在二维空间上的颜色所组成；但我们所以能得出这个结论，却是因为我们想到了视觉表面的二维性，或者是因为想到像油画、镜子这样的二维人工制品是可以产生立体幻觉的，或者更抽象地，只是因为想到光在空间的截面只能采取平面的形式。我们也可以认为，声觉材料是由许多个取决于两个变量（声调和响度）的成分所组成；但如果没有关于振动的弦的频率和振幅这两个物理量的知识就不会有这样的想法。

（陈译：然而，即使我们不对感觉材料做任何解释以力求其还原再现，我们发现自己也还是要瞥视自然科学知识。）

(翟评：不对感觉材料做解释和再现它们两者之间并无转折或递进关系。)

 

The motivating insight, viz. that we can know external things through impacts at our nerve endings, is itself based on our general knowledge of the ways of physical objects—illuminated desks, reflected light, activated retinas. Small wonder that the quest for sense data should be guided by the same sort of knowledge that prompts it.

我们只有通过作用于我们神经末梢的效果才能认识到外间的事物，这一洞见激发了贝克莱这样的哲学家们的工作。但是这个洞见本身却是以我们关于物理对象——被照亮了的桌子，被反射的光，被激活的视网膜——的行为方式的一般知识为基础的。所以用不着感到奇怪，对感觉材料的探索应该受促成这一探索的同类知识的导引。

 

Aware of the points thus far set forth, our philosopher may still try, in a spirit of rational reconstruction, to abstract out pure stream of sense experience and then depict physical doctrine as a means of systemizing the regularities discernable in the stream. He may imagine an ideal “protocol language” which, even if in fact learned after common-sense talk of physical things or not at all, is evidentially prior: a fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news. Talk of ordinary physical things he would then see as, in principle, a device for simplifying that disorderly account of the passing show.

即使注意到了上面的论点，我们的哲学家可能仍希望——本着理性重建的精神——抽象出纯粹的感觉经验之流，并将物理学说看成系统地处理见之于感觉经验之流中规律的手段。他可能设想一种理想的“记录语言”，虽然这种语言在事实上是后于常识的物理事物语言而习得，甚至根本就无法习得，但它在证据上却居于优先地位：一种想像出来的但本身却毫无想像力的用来报道未被修饰的信息的媒介。通常的物理事物的语言，在原则上可以看成简化对转瞬即逝的感觉经验的杂乱无章的报道的手段。

（陈译：他也许因此会设想一种理想的“记录语言”，这种语言不论事实上是不是从日常对物理事物的谈论中吸取来的，它都显然比日常语言更占有优先地位：它是对原本未加粉饰的信息的一种幻想出来的却无任何幻想力的媒介。）

（翟评：evidentially prior译错了。如果看过奎因的“设定物及其实在性”一文，就会知道，奎因区分了三种不同的在先性：日常对象在概念上conceptually在先，感觉材料在证据上evidentially在先，基本粒子在自然上naturally在先。）

 

But this is a misleading way of depicting matters, even when the idea of a sense-datum “language” is counted frankly as metaphor. For the trouble is that immediate experience simply will not, of itself, cohere as an autonomous domain. Reference to physical things are largely what hold it together. These references are not just inessential vestiges of the initially intersubjective character of language, capable of being weeded out by devising an artificially subjective language for sense data. Rather they give us our main continuing access to past sense data themselves; for past sense data are mostly gone for good except as commemorated in physical posits. All we would have apart from posits and speculation are present data and present memories of past ones; and a memory trace of a sense datum is too meager an affair to do much good. Actual memories mostly are traces not of past sensations but of past conceptualization or verbalization.

即使感觉材料“语言”被直截了当地看成是隐喻，这也是对事情真相的令人误解的描述。困难在于，当下的经验本身绝不能构成一个自足的论域。对物理事物的提及对于它的聚拢是个基本的条件。它们并不只是语言最初的主体间性的无关紧要的残留，从而可以通过设计一种用于感觉材料的人为的主观语言即可加以去除。对物理事物的提及毋宁是我们不断通向过去的感觉材料本身的主要渠道；因为过去的感觉材料大多数已经一去不复返了，留下的只有在物理设定物中的记录。除去物理的设定物和关于它们的推想，我们只拥有当下的感觉材料以及对过去感觉材料的当下的记忆；但对感觉材料的记忆痕迹是太微弱了，并没有什么用处。现实的记忆多半不是过去的感觉的痕迹，而是过去的概念化或言语化过程的痕迹。

 

There is every reason to inquire into the sensory or stimulatory background of ordinary talk of physical things. The mistake comes only in seeking an implicit sub-basement of conceptualization, or of language. Conceptualization on any considerable scale is inseparable from language, and our ordinary language of physical things is about as basic as language gets.

我们有充分的理由探究普通的物理事物语言的感觉或刺激的背景。错误只是在于寻求概念化或语言的隐含的基础。任何值得考虑的概念化都是与语言分不开的，而最基本的语言就是我们关于物理事物的普通语言。

 

Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat. If we improve our understanding of ordinary talk of physical things, it will not be by reducing that talk to a more familiar idiom; there is none. It will be by clarifying the connections, causal or otherwise, between ordinary talk of physical things and various further matters which in trun we grasp with help of ordinary talk of physical things.

诺伊拉特曾将科学比作漂浮在海上的一艘船，如果我们想要重建它，必须是一块板一块板地重建，而且必须同时呆在这艘船上。哲学家和科学家都在这同一艘船上。如果我们想增进对物理事物的普通语言的理解，并不能指望把它还原为一处更熟悉的语言；没有比物理事物的普通语言更熟悉的语言了。我们所能做的只能是：澄清物理事物的普通语言和通过这种语言的帮助而掌握的各种进一步的东西之间的因果联系或其他联系。

 

On the face of it there is a certain verbal perversity in the idea that ordinary talk of familiar physical things is not in large part understood as it stands, or that the familiar physical things are not real, or that evidence for their reality needs to be uncovered. For surely the key words ‘understood’, ‘real’, and ‘evidence’ here are too ill-defined to stand up under such punishment. We should only be depriving them of the very denotations to which they mainly owe such sense as they make to us. It was a lexicographer, Dr. Johnson, who demonstrated the reality of a stone by kicking it; and to begin with, at least, we have little better to go on than Johnsonian usage. The familiar material objects may not be all that is real, but they are admirable examples.

如果我们过于较真，就会有下面这种语词上的偏执：关于熟悉的物理事物的普通语言在很大程度上不能照字面上理解，或者熟悉的物理事物是不实在的，或者它们的实在性的证据还有待揭示。这里的关键词“理解”、“实在”和“证据”的含义远不是清楚的，所以是不堪这样的重负的。如果我们接受上面的想法，我们也就剥夺了这些词的指谓功能，而这些词对我们的含义主要地就是得之于它们所指的事物。有一位词典编纂学家，约翰逊博士，曾论证说，石头的实在性的证据就在于我们能踢它；我们并没有比约翰逊的办法更好的证明实在性的办法，至少在开始阶段是如此。熟悉的物质对象也许不是实在的事物的全部，但却是它们的典范。

 

There are, however, philosophers who overdo this line of thought, treating ordinary language as sacrosanct. They exalt ordinary language to the exclusion of one of its own traits: its disposition to keep on evolving. Scientific neologism is itself just linguistic evolution gone self-conscious, as science is self-conscious common sense. And philosophy in turn, as an effort to get clearer on things, is not to be distinguished in essential points of purpose and method from good and bad science.

但是，有些哲学家过分重视了这个思路，他们把日常语言看成是神圣不可侵犯的。他们过于抬举日常语言，甚至否定它自身的一个特点，即它的不断演化的特点。科学上的新词本身就是自我意识到的语言演化的结果，就像科学是自我意识到的常识一样。同样地，哲学，作为把事情弄清楚的一种努力，无论在目的还是方法上，都不能与科学（无论是好的科学还是坏的科学）有实质上的不同。

 

In particular we shall find, as we get on with organizing and adjusting various of the turns of phrase that participate in what pass for affirmations of existence, that certain of these take on key significance in the increasingly systematic structure; and then, reacting in a manner typical of scientific behavior, we shall come to favor these idioms as the existence affirmations “strictly so-called.” One could even end up, though we ourselves shall not, by finding that the smoothest and most adequate overall account of the world does not after all accord existence to ordinary physical things, in that refined sense of existence. Such eventual departures from Johnsonian usage could partake of the spirit of science and even of the evolutionary spirit of ordinary language itself.

特别地，当我们组织和调整各种不同的存在断言时，会发现其中某些断言在系统化日益增长的结构中起着关键的作用。我们会进而看重这些断言，称之为“严格意义上的”存在断言；这种反应是完全符合科学精神的。在组织和调整结束时，人们可能会发现——尽管我们自己不会走到这一步——对世界作最通畅和最适当的整体描述时，用不着将严格意义上的存在性赋予普通的物理事物。这种与约翰逊式的实在性标准的最终背离，仍可能是符合科学精神的，甚至也符合日常语言本身的进化精神。

 

Our boat stays afloat because at each alternation we keep the bulk of it intact as a going concern. Our words continue to make passable sense because of continuity of change of theory: we warp usage gradually enough to avoid rupture. And such, in the beginning, is the case for Johnsonian usage itself, since our questioning of objects can coherently begin only in relation to a system of theory which is itself predicated on our interim acceptances of objects. We are limited in how we can start even if not in where we may end up. To vary Neurath’s figure with Wittgenstein’s, we may kick away our ladder only after we have climbed it.

我们的船一直漂浮在海面上，因为我们在每次修理时都使船身的大部分保持不变，以保证它能持续运行。我们的语词由于理论的连续性而能继续为人理解：我们对用法的调整是渐进的，足以避免出现断层。作为出发点的约翰逊式的用法也是这种情形，因为只有相对于某个（暂时）承认某些对象的实在性的理论系统，我们才可能对另一些对象的实在性提出质疑。无论如何，我们在调整开始时是要受到一些框框的限制的，尽管以怎样的结局收场可能是开放的。我们可以用维特根斯坦的比喻来改写诺伊拉特的比喻：只有在爬过梯子之后才能将梯子踢开。

 

So the proposition that external things are ultimately to be known only through their action on our bodies should be taken as one among various coordinate truths, in physics and elsewhere, about initially unquestioned physical things. It qualifies the empirical meaning of our talk of physical things, while not questioning the reference. There remains abundant reason to inquire more closely into the empirical meaning or stimulatory conditions of our talk of physical things, for we learn in this way about the scope of creative imagination in science; and such inquiry is none the worse for being conducted within the framework of those same physical acceptations. No inquiry being possible without some conceptual scheme, we may as well retain and use the best one we know—right down to the latest detail of quantum mechanics, if we know it and it matters.

因此，外间的事物最终只有通过它们对我们身体的作用才能被知道这一主张，应被视为物理学和其他科学中关于（一开始无可怀疑的）物理事物的许多相互联系的真理中的一个。它确实规定了关于物理事物的陈述的经验意义，但并不怀疑物理事物的实在性。有充分的理由更仔细地探究关于物理事物的陈述的经验意义或刺激条件，因为我们正是通过这样的探究才了解到科学中的创造性的想像力的范围；这样的探究要受包含承认物理对象的同样的框架所限制，这并不会降低它的价值。离开了这样那样的概念框架，任何探究都是不可能的，因此我们完全可以坚持和运用我们所知道的最好的概念框架——直至量子力学的最新的细节，如果我们知道而且这种细节又很重要的话。

 

Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race. In assimilating this cultural fare we are little more aware of a distinction between report and invention, substance and style, cues and conceptualization, than we are of a distinction between the proteins and the carbohydrates of our material intake. Retrospectively we may distinguish the components of theory-building, as we distinguish the proteins and carbohydrates while subsisting on them. We cannot strip away the conceptual trappings sentence by sentence and leave a description of the objective world; but we can investigate the world, and man as a part of it, and thus find out what cues he could have of what goes on around him. Subtracting his cues from his world view, we get man’s net contribution as the difference. This difference marks the extent of man’s conceptual sovereignty—the domain within which he can revise theory while saving the data.

不论我们如何分析理论的构造，我们都必然从中间开始。在概念上初始的东西是大小和距离都适中的事物，我们对它们以及其他所有东西的引进都发生于人类文化演进的中途。我们在吸收这份文化食粮时，很少注意到报道和发明、内容和风格、线索和概念化之间的区别，就像我们摄取物质食粮时，很少注意到蛋白质和碳水化合物之间的区别一样。后来的区分是反思的产物，我们通过反思区分了理论构造的组成部分，就像我们通过反思区分了食物中的蛋白质和碳水化合物一样，但我们仍要依赖这些成分维持文化上的和物质上的生命。我们不可能逐句逐句地剥开概念的陷阱，达到对客观世界的纯描述的境界；但是我们可以探索世界以及作为世界之一部分的人，从而发现他所处的这个世界可能会给他哪些线索。从他的世界观中减去这些线索，其差值就是纯粹由人提供的东西。这个差值是人在概念上的自主性的标识——在这个领域内他可以在拯救感觉材料的基础上修改他的理论。

 

In a general way, therefore, I propose in the introductory chapter to ponder out talk of physical phenomena as a physical phenomenon, and our scientific imaginations as activities within the world that we imagine. Later chapters will treat more closely of details.

因此，在这开篇的第一章中，我要笼统地提议认真考虑下面这个事实：我们对物理现象的谈论本身也是一种物理现象，我们的科学想像活动本身也是我们所想像的这个世界中的一种活动。后面的各章将予以更详细的考察。

（陈译：因此，我在这开篇的第一章里一般地提出要对我们将物理现象作为物理现象的谈论和作为我们所想像的世界内的活动的科学想像加以思考。）

（翟评：陈译基本上没看懂原文。）

 

 

此文于2009年5月21日星期四8:39 pm发表于“奎因”分类下。您可以通过RSS 2.0 feed来跟踪此文的所有评论。您可以留言，或者从您自己的网站trackback。