MEANING AND THE MORAL SCIENCES
MEANING AND THE MORAL SCIENCES
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意义与道德科学
DOI：
10.1111/j.1468-0149.1979.tb02691.x
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发表时间：
1979
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
B. Mayo
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
B. Mayo
这本短书由四部分组成。《意义与知识》是1976年约翰·洛克的六次演讲，其中四分之一也作为亚里士多德学会的论文《什么是现实主义？》发表；另外三部分，只有几页长，要么发表要么发表论文：《文学、科学与反思》、《参考与理解》、《现实主义与理性》。两个统一的主题是现实主义和社会科学的本质。我将特别讨论第二个主题及其与第一个主题的联系，这可能是本书的显著特点，尽管它也是最不令人满意的。一篇比我有篇幅和倾向(分别)更全面和更有利的评论已经出现在这本书中。这本书虽短，但对读者来说是一本苦差事。高级研讨会的一些令人兴奋的东西出现在印刷品中(经常提到未发表的作品，如达米特的威廉·詹姆斯讲座，以及与奎恩和古德曼的对话)，但其效果是一套杂乱无章的成绩单，实际上与一篇相关的论文相去甚远。这些无标题的讲座有一些章节的标题是“再次物理主义”或“题外话”；每一页都自由地散布着斜体和吓人的引语；“毛茸茸的”、“可爱的”和“马虎的”是最受欢迎的逻辑评估术语；在说明性的错误中，有一些图表无疑在黑板上表现得很好，但在这里完全没有解释。有价值的往往是一句犀利的警句，如“现实主义是科学的科学哲学”，“我的意思是……是覆盖在使用上的粗格子“。但以维特根斯坦的图像论和意义使用论不是互不相容而是相辅相成这一主要论断为例，我们可以举一个很难找到方向的例子。这一令人不快的格言的每一半都可以跟进：有使用而不是真理的语言(P.gg)，以及有参照而没有意义的语言(P.I 15)，但为了辩护后者，一个有点令人震惊的“私人语言”主张，我们参考了在其他地方发表的一篇论文；很难看出这两种观点如何是连贯的：用他自己的比喻说，在不知道地图是如何使用的情况下，人们能知道地图与地形对应的是什么吗？普特南是一个经验的(且“复杂的”)现实主义者，但不是形而上学的现实主义者：不同的是，事物可能与特定的陈述或理论所说的不同，但不是满足除真理条件以外的所有标准的理论。他不仅拒绝反现实主义的经典形式现象主义、运筹学--
This short book consists of four Parts.“Meaning and Knowledge” is the six John Locke lectures of 1976, one and a quarter of which were also given as the Aristotelian Society paper “What is Realism?”; the other three “Parts”, only a few pages long, are papers either published or delivered:“Literature, Science and Reflection”,“Reference and Understanding”, and “Realism and Reason”. The two unifying themes are Realism, and the nature of the Social Sciences. I shall attend particularly to the second theme and its connection with the first, which is perhaps the distinctive feature of this book, though it is also the least satisfactory. A fuller and more favourable review than I have the space and the disposition for (respectively) has appeared in THES. The book, though short, is hard work for the reader. Something of the excitement of high-powered seminars comes over in print (there are frequent references to unpublished work, such as Dummett’s William James Lectures, and to conversations with Quine and Goodman) but the effect is of a messy set of transcripts, very far indeed from a connected treatise. The untitled Lectures have sections with titles like “Physicalism Again” or “Digression”; every page is liberally sprinkled with italics and scare quotes;‘hairy’,‘cute’and ‘sloppy’are favoured terms of logical appraisal; and among the expository infelicities are some diagrams which no doubt went well on the blackboard but are wholly unexplained here. What is valuable is often a trenchant epigram like “Realism is science’s philosophy of science”,‘LMeaning.. is a coarse grid laid over use”. But as an example of the difficuIty in finding one’s way about, take the major claim that Wittgenstein’s picture-theory and use-theory of meaning are not incompatible but complementary. Each half of this obiter dictum can be followed up: there is language with use and not truth (p. gg), and there is language with reference and not meaning (p. I 15), but for the defence of the latter, a somewhat startling “private language” claim, we are referred to a paper published elsewhere; and it is hard to see how either of these is coherent: to use his own analogy, can one know what it is for a map to correspond to a terrain without knowing how a map is used, and vice versa?Putnam is an empirical (and “sophisticated”) Realist, but not a metaphysical one: the difference being that things could be otherwise than they are said to be by a particular statement or theory, but not by a theory which satisfies all the criteria except only the truth-condition. He rejects Anti-Realism not only in its classical forms of phenomenalism, operation-