实在论的多副面孔

出版时间：2005-10  出版社：中国人民大学出版社  作者：[美] 希拉里·普特南  页数：99  字数：96000  译者：冯艳  
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内容概要

本书是由四篇演讲组成的演讲集。在前两篇演讲中，普特南指出了形而上学实在论及其各种熟悉的变种的荒谬和自相矛盾之处，捍卫了内在实在论（也称为实用主义实在论）的观点。在后两篇演讲中，作者通过关注一些道德映像，论证了伦理学中实用主义实在论的观点，捍卫了道德映像是我们的道德和文化遗产中一个必不可少的部分和道德的客观性思想。

作者简介

希拉里·普特南（Hilary putnam,1926—）是20世纪70年代以后成名的美国哲学家和逻辑学家。他早年曾跟随逻辑经验主义者莱欣巴赫学习科学哲学，后来又在蒯因门下学习逻辑。1951年，在加利福尼亚大学获博士学位，随后曾在美国西北大学和普林斯顿大学任教。1961年，担任麻省理工

书籍目录

序言演讲I 关于实在和真理，还有什么要说的吗？  内在的性质：颂向  内在的性质：意向性  为什么意向性如此难以对付  人类魔爪的踪迹  无处不在演讲II 实在论和合理性  没有二分的实在演讲III 平等和我们关于世界的道德映像  法兰克福学派为平等辩护的尝试  没有道德映像的民主演讲IV 作为事实和作为价值的合理性  科学的方法  认识论难题  皮尔士之谜的重要意义注释索引译后记

用户评论 (总计7条)

•   是由学生译的，语名不通顺，翻译的不好，可惜了名作。
•   　　这本东西的渣翻译真的可以去死了
  　　贴第一部分，可以对照来看。
  　　
  　　
  　　
  　　The man on the street, Eddington reminded us, visualizes a table as 'solid'--that is, as mostly solid matter. But physics has discovered that the table is mostly empty space: that the distance between the particles is immense in relation to the radius of the electron or the nucleus of one of the atoms of which the table consists. One reaction to this state of affairs, the reaction of Wilfrid Sellars, 1 is to deny that there are tables at all as we ordinarily conceive them (although he chooses an ice cube rather than a table as his example). The commonsense conception of ordinary middle-sized material objects such as tables and ice cubes (the 'manifest image') is simply false in Sellars's view (although not without at least some cognitive value--there are real objects that the 'tables' and 'ice cubes' of the manifest image 'picture', acccording to Sellars, even if these real objects are not the layman's tables and ice cubes). I don't agree with this view of Sellars's, but I hope he will forgive me if I use it, or the phenomenon of its appearance on the philosophical scene, to highlight certain features of the philosophical debate about 'realism'.
  　　
  　　First of all, this view illustrates the fact that Realism with a capital 'R' doesn't always deliver what the innocent expect of it. If there is any appeal of Realism which is wholly legitimate it is the appeal to the commonsense feeling that of course there are tables and chairs, and any philosophy that tell us that there really aren't--that there are really only sense data, or only 'texts', or whatever, is more than slightly crazy. In appealing to this commonsense feeling, Realism reminds me of the Seducer in the oldfashioned melodrama. In the melodramas of the 1890s the Seducer always promised various things to the Innocent Maiden which he failed to deliver when the time came. In this case the Realist (the evil Seducer) promises common sense (the Innocent Maiden) that he will rescue her from her enemies (Idealists, Kantians and Neo-Kantians, Pragmatists, and the fearsome self-described "Irrealist" Nelson Goodman) who (the Realist says) want to deprive her of her good old ice cubes and chairs. Faced with this dreadful prospect, the fair Maiden naturally opts for the company of the commonsensical Realist. But when they have travelled together for a little while the 'Scientific Realist' breaks the news that what the Maiden is going to get isn't her ice cubes and tables and chairs. In fact, all there really is--the Scientific Realist tells her over breakfast--is what 'finished science' will say there is-whatever that may be. She is left with a promissory note for She Knows Not What, and the assurance that even if there aren't tables and chairs, still there are some Dinge an sich that her 'manifest image' (or her 'folk physics', as some Scientific Realists put it) 'picture'. Some will say that the lady has been had.
  　　
  　　Thus, it is clear that the name 'Realism' can be claimed by or given to at least two very different philosophical attitudes (and, in fact, to many). The philosopher who claims that only scientific objects 'really exist' and that much, if not all, of the commonsense world is mere 'projection' claims to be a 'realist', but so does the philosopher who insists that there really are chairs and ice cubes (and some of these ice cubes really are pink), and these two attitudes, these two images of the world, can lead to and have led to many different programs for philosophy.
  　　
  　　Husserl 2 traces the first line of thought, the line that denies that there 'really are' commonsense objects, back to Galileo, and with good reason. The present Western worldview depends, according to Husserl, on a new way of conceiving 'external objects'-- the way of mathematical physics. An external thing is conceived of as a congeries of particles (by atomists) or as some kind of extended disturbance (in the seventeenth century, a 'vortex', and later a collection of 'fields'). Either way, the table in front of me (or the object that I 'picture as' a table) is described by 'mathematical formulas', as Husserl says. And this, he points out, is what above all came into Western thinking with the Galilean revolution: the idea of the 'external world' as something whose true description, whose description 'in itself', consists of mathematical formulas.
  　　
  　　It is important to this way of thinking that certain familiar properties of the table--its size and shape and location--are 'real' properties, describable, for example, in the language of Descartes' analytic geometry. Other properties, however, the so-called 'secondary' properties, of which color is a chief example, are not treated as real properties in the same sense. No 'occurrent' (nondispositional) property of that swarm of molecules (or that space-time region) recognized in mathematical physics can be said to be what we all along called its color.
  　　
  　　What about dispositional properties? It is often claimed that color is simply a function of reflectancy, that is, of the disposition of an object (or of the surface of an object) to selectively absorb certain wavelengths of incident light and reflect others. But this doesn't really do much for the reality of colors. Not only has recent research shown that this account is much too simple (because changes of reflectancy across edges turn out to play an important role in determining the colors we see), but reflectancy itself does not have one uniform physical explanation. A red star and a red apple and a reddish glass of colored water are red for quite different physical reasons. In fact, there may well be an infinite number of different physical conditions which could result in the disposition to reflect (or emit) red light and absorb light of other wavelengths. A dispositional property whose underlying non-dispositional 'explanation' is so very non-uniform is simply incapable of being represented as a mathematical function of the dynamical variables. And these--the dynamical variables-are the parameters that this way of thinking treats as the 'characteristics' of 'external' objects.
  　　
  　　Another problem 3 is that hues turn out to be much more subjective than we thought. In fact, any shade on the color chart in the green part of the spectrum will be classed as 'standard green' by some subject--even if it lies at the extreme 'yellow-green' end or the extreme 'blue-green' end.
  　　
  　　In sum, no 'characteristic' recognized by this way of thinking--no 'well-behaved function of the dynamical variables'--corresponds to such a familiar property of objects as red or green. The idea that there is a property all red objects have in common--the same in all cases-and another property all green objects have in common-the same in all cases--is a kind of illusion, on the view we have come more and more to take for granted since the age of Descartes and Locke.
  　　
  　　However, Locke and Descartes did give us a sophisticated substitute for our pre-scientific notion of color; a substitute that has, perhaps, come to seem mere 'post-scientific common sense' to most people. This substitute involves the idea of a sense datum (except that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century vocabulary, sense data were referred to as 'ideas' or 'impressions'). The red sweater I see is not red in the way I thought it was (there is no 'physical magnitude' which is its redness), but it does have a disposition (a Power, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century idiom) to affect me in a certain way--to cause me to have sense data. And these, the sense data, do truly have a simple, uniform, non-dispositional sort of 'redness'.
  　　
  　　This is the famous picture, the dualistic picture of the physical world and its primary qualities, on the one hand, and the mind and its sense data, on the other, that philosophers have been wrangling over since the time of Galileo, as Husserl says. And it is Husserl's idea--as it was the idea of William James, who influenced Husserl--that this picture is disastrous.
  　　
  　　But why should we regard it as disastrous? It was once shocking, to be sure, but as I have already said it is by now widely accepted as 'post-scientific common sense'. What is really wrong with this picture?
  　　
  　　For one thing, solidity is in much the same boat as color. If objects do not have color as they 'naively' seem to, no more do they have solidity as they 'naively' seem to. 4 It is this that leads Sellars to say that such commonsense objects as ice cubes do not really exist at all. What is our conception of a typical commonsense object if not of something solid (or liquid) which exhibits certain colors? What there really are, in Sellars's scientific metaphysics, are objects of mathematical physics, on the one hand, and 'raw feels', on the other. This is precisely the picture I have just described as "disastrous"; it is the picture that denies precisely the common man's kind of realism, his realism about tables and chairs.
  　　
  　　The reply to me (the reply a philosopher who accepts the post-Galilean picture will make) is obvious: 'You are just nostalgic for an older and simpler world. This picture works; our acceptance of it is an "inference to the best explanation". We cannot regard it as an objection to a view that it does not preserve everything that laymen once falsely believed.'
  　　
  　　If it is an inference to the best explanation, it is a strange one, however. How does the familiar explanation of what happens when I 'see something red' go? The light strikes the object (say, a sweater), and is reflected to my eye. There is an image on the retina ( Berkeley knew about images on the retina, and so did Descartes, even if the wave aspect of light was not well understood until much later). There are resultant nerve impulses ( Descartes knew there was some kind of transmission along the nerves, even if he was wrong about its nature--and it is not clear we know its nature either, since there is again debate about the significance of chemical, as opposed to electrical, transmissions from neuron to neuron.) There are events in the brain, some of which we understand thanks to the work of Hubel and Wiesel, David Marr, and others. And then--this is the mysterious part--there is somehow a 'sense datum' or a 'raw feel'. This is an explanation?
  　　
  　　An 'explanation' that involves connections of a kind we do not understand at all ("nomological danglers", Herbert Feigl called them 5 ) and concerning which we have not even the sketch of a theory is an explanation through something more obscure than the phenomenon to be explained. As has been pointed out by thinkers as different from one another as William James, Husserl, and John Austin, every single part of the sense datum story is supposition--theory--and theory of a most peculiar kind. Yet the epistemological role 'sense data' are supposed to play by traditional philosophy required them to be what is 'given', to be what we are absolutely sure of independently of scientific theory. The kind of scientific realism we have inherited from the seventeenth century has not lost all its prestige even yet, but it has saddled us with a disastrous picture of the world. It is high time we looked for a different picture.
  　　
  　　
  　　
  　　
  　　
•   　　普特南把他对世界的信念总结为一句话：“心灵与物质一起创造了心灵与物质”，他把他的这种观点称为“内在的实在论”。
  　　“实在论”意味着相信确有一个外在的世界存在，这个世界的存在独立于观察、思想、想象等主观行为；而所谓“内在的”，以我的理解，大概是说，不存在所谓“事物的客观的（或本来的）存在方式”，由于任何关于“存在方式”的言说必然是在特定的“概念关系”之下得出，因此并不存在客观和主观的天然界限，因此，通过这种“内在的实在论”，普特南以他的方式解决（或取消）了一个传统的重要的认识论的问题：即主观与客观如何符合。
  　　本书的任务在于消弭某种二分法，这种二分法可以被表述为不同的二元组：主观－客观，科学（严格科学、真理）－人文（意见、文化），绝对－相对，等等。普特南认为，一方面，这些被普遍接受的二分法并不像想象中的那样坚实，另一面，取消这些二分也并不意味着必然滑向怀疑论和相对主义。
  　　他试图在否定知识的绝对“客观性”的条件下仍然捍卫知识的有效性——这是威廉·詹姆斯、皮尔士以降的实用主义者的典型立场。
  　　在这本书里，普特南从两个方面来达到他的目的（两手都要硬）：一方面，他认为即使是最精密最严格的科学也不是被实在本身直接规定的，也就是说，并非就是实在的“客观存在的方式”，另一方面，他又认为，即使是那些相对模糊、非量化、盖然的知识（如历史知识、道德学说等）也是有效的知识。
  　　阿普指出，一般所谓知识的“客观”，是就其能够得到普遍公认而言的。他举了一个简单的例子来说明“概念关系”与知识的关系：假设一个仅有3个独立对象(x1, x2, x3)的世界，在这个世界里，如果提问“一共有多少个对象”的问题，则，按照卡尔纳普式的逻辑，回答是3个，但按照华沙学派的观点，则可能是7个，因为后者认为两个对象的和，如"x1+x2"，也可以被看作一个对象；阿普认为，这两种逻辑体系，是无法相互化约的，也没有正确、错误之分，它只是一种“概念关系”（或知识范型）的选择，因此即使对于如此简单的世界中的简单的问题，也不可能有绝对“客观的”的、无争议的回答。
  　　但是阿普马上指出，这并不自然地导向怀疑论和犬儒主义，虽然选定不同的概念体系会产生不同的知识，但这知识不是任意的，如果我们选用卡尔纳普的范型，我们必须说有3个对象，如果选用华沙学派的范型，则必须说有7个对象，因此，虽然我们不能达到普遍一致，但并不意味着我们的知识没有反映现实——这就是说，我们的知识虽然不是“客观的”，但也绝不是“主观的”。说得更清楚一点：出问题的是“客观”、“主观”这对概念本身，如果取消或改变这概念，就可以消除传统形而上学的种种悖谬，使得我们既可以承认知识的相对性又可以承认知识的有效性。
  　　对于人文知识，阿普主要讨论了历史和道德两个领域；其中尤以关于道德的一系列论述为精到。阿普首先剖析了康德的道德形而上学，他指出康德在纯粹理性批判（即科学知识理论）与实践理性批判（道德理论）之间的内在矛盾，在科学理论中，作为第一本体的“物自体”没有任何可描述的属性，除了“不可认知”以外，关于“物自体”没有任何可说，但在道德哲学中，“物自体”却成了道德的超越性的来源，实际上就是上帝的替身。
  　　阿普既不承认道德的超越性的起源，也不认为可能存在一种完全建立在“客观性”之上的道德论，作为后者的代表，他选择了功利主义作为剖析的对象。一般认为，功利主义由于其纯工具性（手段性）的思路以及对任何先在的超越性道德律令的抛弃，达到了一种客观性和科学性，但阿普指出，在功利主义中，同样有一些基本的前提是无法被经验化的，阿普提出了一系列的问题：为什么假定每个人都更愿意幸福而不是痛苦？如何度量幸福？每个人是否是自身的幸福程度的良好的度量者？在追求社会的福利最大化时，我们是以现时人们对于幸福的观念为准，还是以他们的幸福观念可能被改变成的样子为准？通过改造人民关于幸福的观念去达到人类社会的最大福利，与另一种方式，即改造外在现实去适应当前人们关于幸福的观念，这两者是同样合法的吗？
  　　阿普举了赫胥黎的《美好新世界》为例，在那个世界里，在一个善良的独裁者的控制下，人民心满意足地生活着，他们如此满意的代价是他们的精神发展受到控制，以至于在情感上和理智上都永远处于准幼儿期的水平，于是终日兴致勃勃、兴高采烈。对于一个来自我们的社会的（拥有发展成熟的感性和理性的）人来说，这个“美丽新世界”是无法忍受的虚假和幼稚的，但对于那个世界中的人来说，他们的确真诚地感觉到快乐（是的，永远的青春！），那么，从功利主义的观点，这个世界是完美的吗？去创建这样一个社会是值得追求的理想吗？
  　　此书中最后讨论了一个关于“理性”的问题。他举了一个非常有趣的例子，假设给一个人一次唯一的机会，让他选择从两堆扑克中的一堆中抽一张牌。第一堆中有24张黑色牌、一张红色牌，第二堆中有24张红色牌、一张黑色牌。无论他选择哪一堆，如果最后他抽到的是红牌，则得到幸福的永生，如果是黑牌，则得到痛苦的永生，那么，这个人“应该”选择从哪一堆牌中抽牌？毫无疑问，根据理性，他当然应该从第二堆牌中抽！因为那样的话，成功律是24/25，而第一堆的成功率只有1/25。
  　　但是，普特南指出，在只有唯一一次机会，而且生死攸关的机会时，概率到底有何意义？概率本来的含义是在对大量随机事件进行抽样的时候表现出来的倾向，那么，如果不存在大量的、重复的抽样，而只有一次机会，这时说“更有可能”是什么意思呢？阿普认为，在这时，我们采取更“理性”的选择（即：概率更大的选择），实际上是假想着自身不仅仅是自身、更是一个理想的大抽样群体中的代表，我们与其是在“理性”地行动，毋宁说我们就觉得有一种义务去表现得“理性”，而这种理性实际上只有在为一个群体的福利着想时才是真是有效的“理性的”（因为概率只有在大抽样的时候才有实在的意义），所以这种理性本质上是“利他”的。
  　　通过识别出选择中的“理性”与概率、利他之间的关系，似乎普特南觉得他在一定程度上从进化论中发现了道德的实在性：一种“道德映象”，尽管不是一种客观的知识，但它或许实际上根植于我们理性的“利他”倾向，因此对于种群的适应和进化是有益的，因此也就是一种有效的知识，并不能将其归约于文化的相对性而完全取消其作为知识的价值。
  　　普特南的《实在论的多副面孔》是他四次演讲的文字记录，因此并非他最深刻严密的哲学著作，但却被一群哲学家（主要是英美大学中的哲学教授）评为“近50年最重要的西方哲学著作”之一，可见影响还是比较大的。
  　　我全凭记忆的介绍肯定不能忠实地反映这本书的精彩之处，但我还是希望我传达的足以引起大家的阅读兴趣。不管怎样，作为一本哲学“名著”，这本书不算难读，篇幅也不大，汉译不到100页，缺点则是翻译比较差，还有：价格比较昂贵！
  　　
•   “我”所作出的“理性”的行为，实际上只是“我”认为这是“理性”的，也就是说，“我”这样做实际上是在维护这种“理性”。但问题是，个体的理性是否就代表群体的理性？有人会说，个体关于理性的意识就来自群体，比如说一个人不会凭空拥有关于概率的知识。但这不尽然，变态杀人狂会认为自己的杀人行为是“理性”的，但这和群体的理性没有什么关系。所以——我们就觉得有一种义务去表现得“理性”，而这种理性实际上只有在为一个群体的福利着想时才是真是有效的“理性的”，所以这种理性本质上是“利他”的——这个论断不那么令人信服。个人觉得有义务表现的“理性”，并不一定就是有效的理性（即所谓为群体福利着想），只是他认为他体现的“理性”。什么是理性，它只是指行为的的一种合理依据。我没看出这种合理依据必须指向群体的必然性在哪里？
•   “选定不同的概念体系会产生不同的知识，但这知识不是任意的”，这还是假定人是理性的，但是人有非理性的一面，人的知识可以不来自任何概念体系（即便有，也可能只是自认的而不是公认的），甚至也可以是任意的。至于假设一个仅有3个独立对象(x1, x2, x3)的世界，在这个世界里，如果提问“一共有多少个对象”的问题，这和人文领域的道德、理性问题并不是一会事，认识理性和实践理性也不是一回事。
•   Putnam说的意思大概是类似于“自私的基因”，只不过基因的“自私”从人类种群的角度上看就成了“无私”，所以他和E.O.Wilson以及R.Dawkins的取径是差相仿佛的。
  你说的认识理性和实践理性分别是没错的，不过他举那个例子是指的显然是“认识理性”。
•   没看过这本书，不过听作者介绍的那个抽牌的例子，让我想起昆德拉的生命不能承受之轻，最开头托马斯就一直在思考，仅有一次，其实相当于一次也没有，让我们对于这个仅有一次的生命做出选择，是荒谬的。面对一切选择，到底是遵循理性的非此不可，还是怎样都行。
  不知道原著是什么意思，但是个人感觉，选择理性行事，另一方面或者是出于一种生存的不安全感，所以更倾向于从众。