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大学报考指南——文理科其实不重要,重要的是思考​

已有 3486 次阅读 2015-6-5 06:54 |个人分类:剑胆琴心|系统分类:观点评述|关键词:学者| Michael, Shermer

原标题为:“理性,经验主义和怀疑精神 不是专属于 自然科学


因为评论中除了7楼文克玲先生

没有人对这篇文字感兴趣,并且讨论这篇文字。


我想一定是我不会定标题


The Humanities and Science Share the Virtues of Empiricism and Skepticism

人文与科学都拥有 经验主义和怀疑主义的精髓

Reason, empiricism and skepticism are not virtues of science alone

理性,经验主义和怀疑不单是科学独有的精神

By Michael Shermer | May 19, 2015


我在武夷山老师的博客上看到一篇很有思想的文章

[转载]社会科学和法学应该模仿自然科学吗?

而同时我在科学美国人6月号上看到Michael Shermer的这篇专栏,觉得很有趣,于是尝试翻译了一下。文章太长,没时间的朋友只需要看文末一句话:“不管学者在大学的哪个教学楼工作,我们都在朝同一个目标努力:即对事物的真正本质的认识”。




20世纪后期人文学科转向了后现代解构主义,并且坚信没有客观现实的信念。而这样的理念实际上是犯了科学主义的错误 1996年纽约大学物理学家索卡尔戳穿了这些自负的言论。他的著名的文章超越界线:走向量子引力的解释学,充满了后现代的短语和穿插科学术语解构主义比喻,尽管他后来承认是无意义的废话。

In the late 20th century the humanities took a turn toward postmodern deconstruction and the belief that there is no objective reality to be discovered. To believe in such quaint notions as scientific progress was to be guilty of “scientism,” properly said with a snarl. In 1996 New York University physicist Alan Sokal punctured these pretensions with his now famous article “Transgressing the Boundaries:Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” chockablock full of postmodern phrases and deconstructionist tropes interspersed with scientific jargon, which he subsequently admitted were nonsensical gibberish.

而我放弃了人文学科的研究,直到今年三月参与阿姆斯特丹大学人文学科的前教授Rens Bod在欧洲巡回售书活动,该书为The Moral Arc《道德弧》。在售书活动中我们的对话使我重新思考,Bod谈到,我的科学建立了一套描述并解释观测或推测的现象,过去或现在,目的是测试假设和建立理论。这一系统实际上也适用于人文等领域的文字学,艺术史,音乐学,语言学,考古学,史学和文学研究。

I subsequently gave up on the humanities but am now reconsidering my position after an encounter this past March with University of Amsterdam humanities professor Rens Bod during a European book tour for The Moral Arc. In our dialogue, Bod pointed out that my definition of science—a set of methods that describes and interprets observed or inferred phenomena, past or present, aimed at testing hypotheses and building theories—applies to such humanities fields asphilology, art history, musicology, linguistics, archaeology, historiography and literary studies.

Bod讲述了意大利语言学家洛伦佐·瓦拉,他在1440公开了拉丁文档Donatio康斯坦丁尼- 康斯坦丁的捐赠,这是所使用的天主教会合法化土地抢了西方罗马帝国的故事是假的。瓦拉使用历史,语言和语言学证据,包括反推理,反驳的文件,”Bod解释。一个最强有力的证据,他想出了是词汇和语法:瓦拉找到的单词和结构是不可能被从皇帝君士坦丁一世的时间由任何人使用的文档中,在公元4世纪初已故的拉丁词Feudum,例如,提到了封建制度。但是,这是一个中世纪的发明,它并没有在公元七世纪之前存在瓦拉的方法是那些科学,BOD强调:他持怀疑态度,根据他的经验,作了一个假设,理性的他用非常抽象推理(甚至反推理)的方式,以文字现象作为证据,至此他奠定了最成功的理论之一:stemmatic文字逻辑学,的基础。可以用于分析来源于现存拷贝的原始文本原型(事实上,在很久以后的DNA分析是基于在stemmatic文字逻辑学)(请文学系的同学指正,stemmatic文字分析就是文本分析么?)

 

Indeed, I had forgotten the story he recounted of Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla, who in1440 exposed the Latin document Donatio Constantini—the Donation of Constantine, which was used by the Catholic Church to legitimize its land grab of the Western Roman Empire—as a fake. “Valla used historical, linguisticand philological evidence, including counterfactual reasoning, to rebut the document,” Bod explained. “One of the strongest pieces of evidence he came upwith was lexical and grammatical: Valla found words and constructions in the document that could not possibly have been used by anyone from the time of Emperor Constantine I, at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. The late Latin word Feudum, for example, referred to the feudal system. But this was a medieval invention, which did not exist before the seventh century a.d.” Valla's methods were those of science, Bod emphasized: “He was skeptical, he was empirical, he drew a hypothesis, he was rational, he used very abstract reasoning (even counterfactual reasoning), he used textual phenomena as evidence, and he laid the foundations for one of the most successful theories:stemmatic philology, which can derive the original archetype text from extantcopies (in fact, the much later DNA analysis was based on stemmatic philology).”

参见:

能源与可持续性发展:5个步骤来养活世界和维持地球|

演进:没有富裕支线现代宗教的兴起?|

健康:酒精在西方文明的冲突历史|

心灵与智多星:就是食物成瘾使我们发胖? |

空间:暗物质粒子相互作用与自己|

科技:时间线:加工食品的惊人百万年历史

 

SEE ALSO:

·        Energy& Sustainability: 5 Steps to Feed the World and Sustain the Planet |

·        Evolution: Did Affluence Spur the Rise of Modern Religions? |

·        Health: The Conflicted History of Alcohol inWestern Civilization |

·        Mind& Brain: Is Food Addiction Making Us Fat? |

·        Space: Dark Matter Particles Interact with Themselves |

·        Technology: Timeline: The Amazing Multimillion-Year History of Processed Food

由瓦拉的语言学圣经的分析的启发,荷兰人文主义者伊拉斯谟采用这种相同的技术来证明,例如,三位一体的概念并没有在11世纪前出现在圣经中。 1606年荷兰莱顿大学教授约瑟夫·贾斯特斯凯利格出版了对古埃及王朝的哲学重构,发现世界文明史最早的证据之一,可追溯到公元前5285,近1300年早于圣经中创造世界的年表。这导致后来的学者如斯宾诺莎拒绝将圣经作为一个可靠的历史文献。“因此,抽象推理,理性主义,经验主义和怀疑是不只是科学的精神,”布德的结论。“他们全都都来源于人文学科。”

Inspired by Valla'sphilological analysis of the Bible, Dutch humanist Erasmus employed these same empirical techniques to demonstrate that, for example, the concept of the Trinity did not appear in bibles before the 11th century. In 1606 LeidenUniversity professor Joseph Justus Scaliger published a philological reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian dynasties, finding that the earliestone, dating to 5285 b.c., predated the Bible's chronology for the creation ofthe world by nearly 1,300 years. This led later scholars such as Baruch Spinozato reject the Bible as a reliable historical document. “Thus, abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism and skepticism are not just virtues of science,” Bod concluded. “They had all been invented by the humanities.”

为什么这个区别很重要?因为这个时代学生和资助正在逃离人文学科。而为人文学科辩护的辩护词:修身养性,实际上恰恰忽略了人文学科的实际价值,Bod有力地阐述他的新书,A New History of the Humanities(牛津大学出版社,2014年)。科学与人文之间的跨学科连接充分体现了德语中Geisteswissenschaften精神科学)一词,意思是人文科学。而这一概念涵盖人类的一切事,包括我们产生关于自然世界的科学理论。常常人文学者认为他们正在朝科学靠拢,并使用实证的方法。布德强调。实际上他们错了:采用实证方法人文学者正在返回自己起源于15世纪的历史,这一做法是首先报道于humanitatis这一刊物

Why does this distinction matter? Because at a time when students and funding are fleeing humanities departments, the argument that they are at least good for“self-cultivation” misses their real value, which Bod has forcefully articulated in his recent book A New History of the Humanities (OxfordUniversity Press, 2014). The transdisciplinary connection between the sciences and humanities is well captured in the German word Geisteswissenschaften,which means “human sciences.” This concept embraces everything humans do,including the scientific theories we generate about the natural world. “Too often humanities scholars believe that they are moving toward science when they use empirical methods,” Bod reflected. “They are wrong: humanities scholars using empirical methods are returning to their own historical roots in the studia humanitatis of the 15th century, when the empirical approach was first invented.”

不管学者在大学的哪个教学楼工作,我们都在朝同一个目标努力:即对事物的真正本质的认识。这scientia humanitatis的方式无论是科学或人文研究都共同采用。

Regardless of which university building scholars inhabit, we are all working toward the same goal of improving our understanding of the true nature of things, and that is the way of both the sciences and the humanities, a scientia humanitatis.


周可真老师一直在疾呼文科也是科学,实际上,我认为这根本不需要讨论。大家都是在做研究,研究自然,研究人性……当然是平等的,都是在研究。而且不存在什么方法更“科学”,因为理性,经验和怀疑都是文理科研究的基础。

 




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