查尔斯·拉莫尔 - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

查尔斯·拉莫尔

历史 & truth

历史, according to Schopenhauer,

teaches but a single lesson: eadem, sed ali-
ter–the same things happen again and
再次, only differently. “Once one has
read Herodotus, one has studied enough
历史, philosophically speaking.”1

如果, like Schopenhauer, we survey hu-

man affairs from afar, assuming the
stance of a neutral spectator, suspending
all our own interests and commitments,
we will have to agree. At so great a re-
移动, what else will we see but, as he
说, countless variations on the same
old theme of people pursuing dreams
they never achieve, or ½nd disappointing
when they do?

Consider the cardinal cases where his-
tory is held to do more than repeat itself,
where it supposedly shows direction and
进步. Theories that scientists in one
age endorse meet nonetheless with refu-
tation in the next. Technological innova-
tions aimed at easing man’s estate go on

查尔斯·拉莫尔, Chester D. Tripp Professor in
the Humanities at the University of Chicago, 是
the author of ½ve books: “Patterns of Moral
Complexity” (1987), “Modernité et morale”
(1993), “The Morals of Modernity” (1996),
“The Romantic Legacy” (1996), and “Les pra-
tiques du moi” (2004).

to create new needs and burdens. Mod-
ern democracies, despite their promise,
do not end the domination of the many
by the few. Progress is bound to seem an
illusion if we look at life from the out-
边, abstracting from our own convic-
tions about nature and the human good.
For then we cannot make out the extent
to which our predecessors, despite their
defeats, were still on the right track. 全部
that we will perceive is their inevitable
failure to accomplish the ends that they
set themselves. History will serve only to
remind us that man’s reach always ex-
ceeds his grasp.

Yet ordinarily we think quite different-
ly than Schopenhauer did about the past,
and about modern times in particular. 在
reflecting on the course of the last ½ve
hundred years we usually conclude that
great strides have been made in under-
standing nature and in creating a more
just society. Patterns of scienti½c and
moral progress come into view, once we
lean on established conceptions of na-
ture and scienti½c method, of individual
rights and human needs. Classical me-
chanics constituted an advance over
Aristotelian physics, we then say, 是-
cause it came nearer to the truth about
事情, 力量, and motion, and perceived

1 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and
Representation (纽约: Dover, 1969), sup-
plements, 小伙子. 38.

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历史 &
truth

more clearly the importance of results
expressible in the form of mathematical
法律. So too in the moral realm: 对全部
its imperfections, the rise of liberal de-
mocracy represented a turn for the bet-
ter when measured against the convic-
tion that political life, particularly where
coercive force is involved, ought to re-
spect the equal dignity of each of its
members.

When we abandon the view from no-

where and turn to appraising the past
by our present lights, new doubts arise,
然而. Relying as they must on our
current ideas of what is true, 重要的,
and right, our judgments about progress
can begin to appear irredeemably paro-
chial. We may wonder whether they
amount to anything more than applaud-
ing others in proportion to their having
happened to think like us. Is not the no-
tion of progress basically an instrument
of self-congratulation? What can we say
to someone who objects that our present
standpoint is merely ours, with no more
right than any other to issue verdicts up-
on earlier times?

One way of handling this worry has

long proved immensely influential; 在-
契据, it taps into the dominant strand of
Western philosophy. Philosophers since
Plato have generally believed that there
exists a body of timeless, universally val-
id principles governing how we ought to
think and act, principles that, 他们有
also supposed, we can only discern by
striving to become timeless ourselves.
Standing back from all that the contin-
gencies of history have made of us, 看法-
ing the world sub specie aeternitatis, 我们
can then take our bearings from reason
本身.

Theories of scienti½c and moral prog-
ress are very much a modern phenome-
非, 当然. But the Enlightenment,
which pioneered them, still found con-
genial the ideal of reason as transcen-

dence when articulating its vision of
the progressive dynamic of modern
想法. A prime example of this ten-
dency is Condorcet’s famous essay on
进步 (Esquisse d’un tableau historique
des progrès de l’esprit humain, 1793). 一次
people in the West, 他争辩说, threw off
the yoke of tradition and recognized at
last that knowledge arises only through
careful generalizations from the givens
of sense experience, scienti½c growth
and moral improvement were bound to
accelerate as they had since the seven-
十世纪.

In a similar spirit, we may believe that

our present point of view amounts to
more than just the current state of opin-
离子, because we have carefully worked
over existing views in the light of rea-
儿子. We may regard ourselves as having
achieved a critical distance toward our
own age, even as we avoid the detach-
ment of Schopenhauer’s neutral specta-
托尔. For reason is not a view from no-
在哪里. It lines up the world from a spe-
ci½c perspective, de½ned by the princi-
ples of thought and action it embodies.
It allows us to determine which of our
present convictions may rightly serve as
standards for the evaluation of the past.
最后, the judgments we then
make about scienti½c and moral prog-
ress will not simply express our own
habits of mind.

Or so it seems. The rub is that our con-
ception of the demands of reason always
bears the mark of our own time and
地方. 为了确定, some rules of reason-
英, such as those instructing us to avoid
contradictions and to pursue the good,
are timelessly available. But they can do
little by themselves to orient our think-
ing and conduct; they have to work in
tandem with more substantive princi-
ples if we are to receive much guidance.
The reason to which we appeal when
critically examining our existing opin-
ions must therefore combine both these

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查尔斯
Larmore
在
进步

因素. And yet the more concrete as-
pects of what we understand by reason
involve principles we have come to
embrace because of their apparent suc-
cess in the past, or because of our gener-
al picture of the mind’s place in nature.
As these beliefs change so does our con-
ception of reason, and earlier concep-
tions sometimes turn out to look quite
mistaken.

再次, Condorcet’s essay offers a
perfect illustration. His con½dence in the
existence of elementary sensations un-
colored by prior assumptions and con-
ceptual schemes belongs to a brand of
empiricism, triumphant in his day, 那
we can no longer accept. Our own no-
tions of reason, however self-evident
they seem to us, may well encounter a
similar fate. But even if they do not meet
with rejection, they will certainly appear
dated, shaped as they are by the particu-
lar historical path that our experience
and reflection have taken.

Doubts of this sort about progress
have intensi½ed over the past century, 作为
reason has shown itself to be less a tribu-
nal standing outside history than a code
expressing our changing convictions
about how we ought to think and act.
Hegel already undertook to ‘historicize’
原因, though he managed at the same
time to hold on to the idea of progress.
His strategy was to claim that the “Bac-
chanalian revel” in which one concep-
tion of reason has succeeded another
exhibits in hindsight a pattern with an
inner necessity: each conception of rea-
son proved unsatisfactory in its own
terms and could only be remedied by its
successor–until there emerged our own
conception (那是, Hegel’s), 哪个
alone lives up to its own expectations.
Today our sense of contingency is far

too acute for any such story to appear
credible. We may believe that our pres-
ent conception of reason has improved
upon preceding ones, which themselves

rightly corrected the errors of those
before them. 仍然, we have to admit that
different improvements might also have
been possible, and that our present view
too may have to be revised. Even though
the standards we invoke for judging our-
selves and the past may be the best we
有, they can seem therefore too much
a hostage of chance and circumstance to
justify any conclusions about progress.

In order to grasp the exact import of

these doubts, we need to keep in mind
the difference between growth and prog-
ress. Take the case of modern natural sci-
恩斯. No one can plausibly see it as a
mere succession of different theories,
each one a fresh speculation about the
世界. In antiquity and the Middle Ages,
the study of nature did often look like
that–and parts of the social sciences
still do. Beginning in the seventeenth
世纪, 然而, physics and then
chemistry and biology turned them-
selves into cumulative enterprises. 他们
set their sights on securing conclusions
solid enough to be passed on as guiding
premises for future inquiry. In large part
it was the combination of mathematics
and experiment that made this possible;
experimental laws in mathematical form
lend themselves to precise testing and,
once con½rmed, are unlikely to be dis-
credited later, even if they have to be
½ne-tuned in the face of new data. 在
同一时间, their precision helps to
orient further research, setting limits on
the hypotheses that henceforth are to be
taken seriously. Not by accident, the his-
tory of modern science displays a clear
line of development leading to our pres-
ent conception of nature. Each stage
along the way has extended and correct-
ed the achievements of its predecessors.
Growth in this sense is unmistakable.

为了确定, growth has not always pro-
ceeded by simple accretion. 有时
new theories have appropriated previous

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历史 &
truth

results by recasting them within very
different conceptual vocabularies.
Sometimes well-corroborated theories
have had to be rejected because they
failed to square with newly available evi-
登塞. And sometimes these two kinds
of theory change have gone together–
as in the scienti½c revolutions dear to
Thomas Kuhn, in which one “paradigm”
replaces another by means of a “gestalt-
switch.” It is nonetheless true that the
revolutions occurring within the mod-
ern sciences of nature, as opposed to
those that preceded or inaugurated
他们, have typically carried over an ac-
cumulated stock of experimental laws.
Maxwell’s equations, 例如, 在-
vived the advent of relativity theory,
even though they had to be reconceived
as making no reference to a luminiferous
ether.

Kuhn complained that science text-
books write the history of their disci-
pline backward from the present, 迪斯-
guising its dramatic twists and turns as
step-by-step contributions to the pres-
ent-day edi½ce of knowledge.2 No doubt
they do distort the past. Yet only in mod-
ern times have such textbooks played
much of a role at all. Only recently has
it become both possible and essential to
expound past results as a body of sys-
tematic doctrine, complemented by
problem sets and answer keys. The very
prominence of these texts testi½es to the
cumulative character of modern science.
Growth is not the same as progress,
然而. Progress means movement to-
ward a goal, whereas growth is essential-
ly a retrospective concept, referring to a
process in which new formations
emerge by building upon earlier ones.
Progress generally entails growth, 但它
posits, 此外, a terminus toward

2 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti½c
Revolutions, 2ND版. (芝加哥: 大学
Chicago Press, 1970; original edition, 1960),
136ff.

which that growth is thought to be ad-
跳跃. Now common opinion holds
that science aims at the truth and that
therefore its astounding growth in the
modern era represents progress in the
direction of that goal. So simplistic a
statement certainly calls for some im-
mediate quali½cations. The modern sci-
ences of nature do not seek truth in gen-
埃拉尔, as though scienti½c knowledge
were the only sort worth having. 他们
focus on the natural world and they de-
vote their energy not to merely piling up
真相 (the more the better), but to as-
sembling truths that can help explain the
workings of nature. 而且, 真相
at which science aims need not be a sin-
gle, rock-bottom order of things, as de-
½ned, 例如, by microphysics. Na-
ture may embrace an irreducible plurali-
ty of levels of reality.

Yet these amendments do not address
the fundamental objection that the com-
mon idea of modern science has come to
provoke: that the concept of scienti½c
progress begins to appear suspect once
we recognize the historical contingency
of the standards we use to judge the
present and the past. If our current view
of nature counts as well founded only by
reference to a conception of reason that
itself arises from the vicissitudes of ex-
经历, how can we maintain that its
improvement on previous views repre-
sents progress toward the truth? 这
question does not challenge the exis-
tence of scienti½c growth: plainly, 自从
十六、十七世纪
there has been a steady accumulation of
experimental laws, and where earlier
theories met with dif½culty they were
corrected in ways that produced the
body of knowledge now expounded in
the textbooks of the various disciplines.
But with what right can we regard this
process as leading to anything other than
simply the prevailing opinions of the
天? Why should we suppose that it has

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查尔斯
Larmore
在
进步

at the same time brought us closer to the
goal of discovering the truth about
自然?

Kuhn gave eloquent expression to this

widespread skepticism. Though he con-
tinued to refer to ‘progress,’ the term as
he used it meant solely growth in puzzle-
solving ability. Progress toward the truth
seemed to him an idle notion, irrelevant
to the analysis of modern science: “做
it really help to imagine that there is
some one full, 客观的, true account of
nature and that the proper measure of
scienti½c achievement is the extent to
which it brings us closer to that ultimate
目标?” His answer was no, since “no
Archimedean platform is available for
the pursuit of science other than the his-
torically situated one already in place.”3
Scientists do not decide among rival the-
ories by invoking truth as a standard. 或者
if they do, it is but shorthand for the
principles on which they actually rely,
即, the methods and scienti½c val-
ues sanctioned by the present state of
询问. Truth–that is, nature as it is in
itself–makes sense as a goal only so long
as reason is thought to offer the means
for pulling ever closer to it. Once the
ideal of reason as transcendence loses its
plausibility, giving way to the recogni-
tion that science always takes its bear-
ings from a historically determined body
of beliefs, our understanding of the aim
of science must be similarly downscaled.
Its goal, Kuhn claimed, consists in solv-
ing the puzzles that current doctrine
happens to pose.

This mode of argument has become a

familiar refrain in many areas of con-
temporary thought. It fuels, 例如,
the vast company of postmodern theo-
rists who regard the idea of science pro-

3 Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti½c Revolutions,
171; and Kuhn, The Road Since Structure (志-
卡戈: 芝加哥大学出版社, 2000), 95.

代达罗斯夏季 2004

gressing toward the truth as the para-
digm of those illusory stories, or meta-
叙事, by which modernity has
sought to give its achievements a univer-
sal legitimacy.4 Historicist attacks on
scienti½c realism, as we may call them,
stem from an important insight. 骗局-
trary to one of the deepest aspirations of
the Enlightenment, if not of philosophy
一般来说, reason does not pry us free
from the contingencies of time and
地方. Substantive principles of rational-
ity are always framed in the light of be-
liefs and ways of life bequeathed by a
past that could have turned out other-
明智的.

All the same, the contemporary skepti-

cism about progress also trades upon a
false assumption, which it shares with
the ideal of transcendent reason it re-
项目. The givens of history are not ob-
stacles, but means. Reasoning from
where we ½nd ourselves is the very way
by which we match our claims against
世界. Creatures of chance though
we are, the world itself remains the ob-
ject of our thinking, and the reasons we
½nd to prefer one belief to another must
be understood as the reasons we have to
think we are drawing closer to the truth.

There is no better way to develop these

points than to look in some detail at the
most famous skeptic writing today. Rich-
ard Rorty, a self-styled “left-wing Kuhn-
ian,” provides the clearest expression of
all that is right- and also wrong-headed
in the antirealist philosophies so com-
mon in our culture. Unlike many other
friends of truth and progress, 我不会
be engaging in a round of Rorty-bashing
in order to declare victorious, 好像
by default, the orthodox views he seeks
to overthrow. Enough has already been
说, I trust, to evidence my sympathy

4 See Jean-François Lyotard, La condition post-
moderne (巴黎: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).

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历史 &
truth

with the historicized concept of reason
that serves as the springboard of his
思维. I intend instead to lay bare the
single line of argument that, amidst his
changing formulations and proliferating
references to other ½gures, ties together
his work as a whole. My object is to
locate the spot where insight turns into
错误.

Common sense says that there is a
world ‘out there’ that exists independ-
ently of the mind, and Rorty wisely de-
nies that it is his wish to doubt so plain a
事实. Even where we do shape the world
to suit our purposes, we proceed by ex-
ploiting the laws of nature at work in the
things around us. But truth, Rorty in-
sists, is not similarly out there. Truth is
a property of the sentences we utter, A
property we judge by standards we our-
selves invoke. Although sometimes the
relevant standard may demand that we
simply look and let the physical world
determine the truth or falsity of a given
statement (例如, “the cat is on the mat”;
“the proton has crossed the cloud cham-
ber”), our very idea of when perception
can settle an issue, as well as the inter-
pretation we then place on what we see,
depends on a whole web of other beliefs
and ways of dealing with the world. 到
call a statement true amounts therefore
to saying that those who share with us a
certain framework of beliefs have reason
to endorse it.

Being true is not, 当然, 相同
as being justi½ed. Yet for Rorty the fact
that a statement justi½ed by our lights
might still turn out false signi½es only
that a better view of things may come
along in which the statement would no
longer pass muster. The distinction be-
tween ‘true’ and ‘justi½ed’ serves, 他
argues, simply a cautionary function,
warning us that we may always ½nd rea-
son to change our minds. ‘True’ does not
refer to some ½nal point of view that we

are laboring to attain and that, 一次
达到了, will show us the world as it
really is. 或者, more exactly, Rorty’s posi-
tion is that we do not need to think in
these terms. The idea of such a view-
point plays no part in our actual deci-
sions about what to believe. Truth, 不是
being ‘out there,’ does not therefore con-
stitute a goal of inquiry, and scienti½c
progress cannot mean getting closer to
真相. What progress does signify for
他, as for Kuhn, is not strictly progress
根本不, but rather growth: an increased
ability to make successful predictions.5
“The world does not speak,” Rorty
likes to quip, “only we do.” We have no
other vocabularies than the language
games we have invented ourselves. 自从
truth is always judged by their means, 他
has occasionally gone on to announce,
in an evident desire to disconcert, 那
truth is something made rather than
found in a reality lying outside our forms
of speech.6

It is tempting to snap back that while

our sentences are manifestly our own
creation, what renders them true or false
–namely, the world–is not. True state-
ments are made, but their truth is not
制成; it is discovered.7 This easy rejoin-
der misses the point, 然而. It fails
to do justice to the historicist insight in-
spiring Rorty’s and many others’ rejec-
tion of traditional ideas of truth and
进步. What sense can there be in
holding that truth is found, if the very
standards by which we determine truth
and falsity–in other words, the roles we

5 理查德·罗蒂, Truth and Progress (凸轮-
桥: 剑桥大学出版社, 1998),
5 , 39.

6 理查德·罗蒂, Contingency, Irony, and Solidar-
性 (剑桥: 剑桥大学出版社,
1989), 6–7.

7 See John Searle, “Rationality and Realism,”
代达罗斯 122 (4) (落下 1993): 55–83.

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查尔斯
Larmore
在
进步

have the world play in shaping our
thinking–are as much a product of hu-
man history as the beliefs they serve to
evaluate? 原因, it then seems, 做
not teach us how to let the world make
our statements true or false; it shows us
how the world as presently conceived
bears on the statements we happen to
utter. If truth is not found, why not then
conclude that it must be made?

尽管如此, precisely because he con-
siders truth to be of little consequence in
our actual decisions about what to be-
lieve, Rorty eschews in his more careful
moments the contrast between making
and ½nding. If truth is indeed an unin-
teresting notion, it scarcely deserves to
be the object of a striking theory. 我们是
indeed to discard as useless the mantra
that science and morality aim at the
truth about nature and the human good.
But Rorty’s more considered proposal is
that we learn to regard their goal as seek-
ing to expand the horizons of intersub-
jective agreement, accommodating new
experience and hitherto neglected inter-
埃斯特. His favored contrast becomes one
between objectivity and solidarity. If ob-
jectivity means taking our bearings from
reality itself, it needs to give way to the
more coherent ideal of striving for soli-
darity, the unforced agreement with oth-
呃. We do better to make hope rather
than knowledge–reasoning together
rather than answerability to the world–
our highest aspiration.8 For science itself
does not undertake to discover more and
more of the truth about how nature
作品. Its purpose is instead, Rorty
avers, to devise by reasoned argument
ever more satisfactory syntheses of theo-
ry and experiment. So too, our moral

8 理查德·罗蒂, Philosophy and Social Hope
(伦敦: 企鹅, 1999); and Rorty, “Solidar-
ity or Objectivity?” in Rorty, Objectivity, 雷拉-
tivism, and Truth (剑桥: Cambridge Uni-
大学出版社, 1991), 21–34.

thinking is most pro½tably understood
not as trying to determine what we truly
owe to one another, but as constructing
increasingly inclusive communities in
which free and open discussion replaces
力量. 协议, not truth, is Rorty’s
preferred idiom for formulating his
“pragmatism.”

The classical pragmatists (Peirce,
James, and Dewey) always looked with
suspicion at philosophy’s habit of set-
ting up dualisms, particularly those that
oppose the absolute and permanent to
the relative and changeable. Theory and
实践, reason and experience, duty
and desire do not exclude one another,
they insisted, but work together from
different angles to help us make sense of
世界. Rorty also prides himself on
being an antidualist. Yet he seems un-
able to state his position without resort-
ing to one or another philosophical dual-
ism of just this sort–if not ½nding ver-
sus making truth, then objectivity versus
团结. His dualist rhetoric is not ac-
cidental. Le style c’est l’homme même. Ror-
ty has staked his all on playing off a his-
toricized concept of reason against the
idea that inquiry aims at the truth; 这
conventional antithesis between time-
less truth and human mutability struc-
tures his thought from the outset, and he
cannot escape its hold simply by trying,
as he does, to downplay the former’s
importance by arguing that only the lat-
ter matters.

Herein lies Rorty’s fatal mistake. 为了
consider how far from obvious it is that
solidarity stands opposed to objectivity.
Agreement with others can take a variety
形式的, depending on the motives that
move us to pursue it. 有时, for in-
姿态, going along with whatever our
fellows say affords a cozy kind of com-
panionship. But what makes reasoned
agreement a good worth achieving, 如果
not that it enhances our prospects of

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历史 &
truth

grasping the way things truly are? 这
opposition between solidarity and objec-
tivity proves evanescent. The best way to
see this is to look again, but now more
closely, at reason and justi½cation.

Deliberating about whether to accept

a problematic statement consists, 作为
Rorty says, in determining how well it
½ts with our existing beliefs. 原因
may guide the appraisal, but the require-
ments that we see reason imposing re-
flect the changing self-understanding of
the community of inquiry to which we
belong. All this is correct.

Yet it offers no basis for denying that
truth forms the object of our endeavors
–and truth conceived as ½tting the way
the world really is, as correspondence
with reality. 的确, the practice makes
no sense without that idea. For what
serves to justify or disqualify the state-
ment under scrutiny is not the psycho-
logical fact that we hold the beliefs to
which we appeal. Our own state of
头脑, in and of itself, has no bearing on
the issue. The probative consideration is
相当, so we presume, that the beliefs
are true–in other words, that the world
is as they describe it to be. Justifying a
hypothesis means, 反过来, showing that
it deserves to stand alongside our estab-
lished beliefs, to join them in their role
as premises for the resolution of future
doubts. It follows that when we examine
the credentials of a problematic proposi-
的, our intention is to settle whether it
matches the way the world really is.
Background beliefs may themselves be
mistaken, and we can always err in what
we say about reality. Fallibility, 然而,
does not make truth any less our goal.
Rorty is right that justi½cation proceeds
by appeal to what we already believe,
by seeking conclusions that others
equipped with similar beliefs can equally
see reason to embrace. Yet this very ac-
tivity is indissociable from making our

thought answerable to the world. Soli-
darity and objectivity go hand in hand.
A similar verdict applies to the allied
dualism he often deploys between cop-
ing and copying. Different descriptions
of the same thing can prove appropriate,
depending on which of our various pur-
poses we are pursuing and which audi-
ence we are therefore addressing. 一些-
times we speak of water as a collection
O molecules, sometimes as an es-
of H
2
sential nutrient for all of life. Does this
意思是, as Rorty argues, that our talk aims
merely at being useful, not at represent-
ing the way the world is in itself? 一次
再次, we are given a false alternative–
utility and truth are inseparable. 我们可以-
not cope with the things around us un-
less we consider how the world looks
from the particular angle we have cho-
sen. Agreed, no single description is the
one and only true description. 但是
existence of many equally true ones mir-
rors the fact, as I suggested before, 那
the world itself comprises multiple lev-
els of reality.9 Water is both those
事物, and a lot more besides.

These remarks about Rorty imply that

scienti½c growth must also count as
progress toward the truth, when the se-
ries of later theories building upon earli-
er ones results in some element of our
present understanding of the natural
世界. I am not suggesting that the two
concepts are synonymous after all. 但
the only way in which growth may fall
short of being progress is by failing to
produce beliefs of the sort we ourselves
endorse. (Thus in Ptolemy’s hands the
geocentric theory grew in sophistica-
的, without moving any closer to the
truth about the planetary motions.) 为了
to believe that something is the case

9 Cf. John Dupré, The Disorder of Things (凸轮-
桥, 大量的。: 哈佛大学出版社, 1993).

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查尔斯
Larmore
在
进步

means holding it to be true, and if our
current beliefs about nature are the out-
come of a self-correcting process, 哪个
the history of modern science has unde-
niably involved, then this process merits
the title of progress. Where past views
do not ½t our present convictions they
must be deemed false, and where they
were corrected so as to yield what we
presently believe, we must suppose that
we have drawn closer to grasping the
world as it really is.

为了确定, truth is then being judged

by existing standards. 然而, 一个可能
ask, what other standards should we use
反而? Rorty and many others today
share a de½ning assumption of the no-
tion of progress they seek to overturn.
They assume that we would be entitled
to consider ourselves nearer the truth
than our predecessors, only if we could
rise above our historical situation and
vindicate our present views from a van-
tage point outside the vicissitudes of ex-
经历. 因此, arguing rightly
that our idea of reason is part and parcel
of our changing web of belief, they go on
to reject truth as the goal of inquiry.

Precisely this assumption is the dogma
we need to dispel. The real revolution in
philosophy would be to regard the con-
tingencies of history as the means by
which we lay hold of reality. 我们不可以
look back (as Hegel supposed) and see in
the developments leading to our current
body of beliefs a path that mankind was
destined to travel. What we can do is
show how our present views represent
an improvement over earlier ones, 和,
to the extent that we can do so, we ought
to conclude that the reasons for prefer-
ring the new to the old are reasons for
thinking we have now a better compre-
hension of the way the world is.

The principles by which we make

these judgments may themselves change
as our conception of nature changes. 但
原因, though historicized, 不

lose its authority to regulate our thought
and to determine the progress we have
达到了. To have good grounds to alter
our beliefs is to have learned from our
mistakes, and such are the terms in
which we should also view the changes
that the notion of reason has undergone.
As the history of science demonstrates,
we have learned how to learn in the very
process of learning about nature.10 In
也就是说, the principles of rationality
we have come to accept are themselves
真相, about how we ought to think and
conduct our inquiries into nature, 那
we now hold to be timelessly, universal-
莱, valid. But as essentially the result of a
learning process, they cannot count as
timelessly accessible.

The idea of moral progress lends itself
to a similar reconstruction, though I do
not have the room to tackle this complex
subject here. For it would ½rst be neces-
sary to explain how such a thing as mor-
al knowledge is possible.11 And then I
would have to point out how the parallel
between moral and scienti½c progress
nonetheless ceases at a crucial point.
Moral progress consists not only in a
deeper understanding of the right and
the good, but also in the achievement of
a better life–and one of the important
truths we have learned is that every way
of life secures some things of value at the
expense of others. Gains come with loss-
英语. Because science aims simply at
知识, scienti½c progress does not
involve an analogous balancing of pluses
and minuses.

In both domains, 然而, 道路
forward is to break the grip that the old
dualisms continue to have on the philo-
sophical mind, even among those who

10 Cf. Dudley Shapere, Reason and the Search for
知识 (多德雷赫特, 荷兰人:
Reidel, 1984), 233.

11 See my book, The Morals of Modernity (凸轮-
桥: 剑桥大学出版社, 1996).

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claim to ½ght against them. Truth itself
is timeless; if Newtonian mechanics
now appears importantly mistaken, 然后
it was always false, even in its heyday.
Our thinking takes place necessarily in
时间, and has no other resources than
those that the past and our own imagi-
nation happen to provide us. Yet the
½nitude that marks every step we take
tracks the world that lies beyond. Rea-
soning from where we ½nd ourselves
means reasoning about the way things
really are. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Burnt
诺顿, “only through time time is con-
quered.”

历史 &
truth

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代达罗斯夏季 2004

55
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