【英文原声版38】Edward Hall: A Treatise of Human Nature

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A genius, a philosopher, and a racist

是天才，是哲学家，也是种族主义者

Zachary Davis: In 1739, Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to chart the nature and limits of human knowledge. He published his theories and findings in what would become one of philosophy’s most influential works, A Treatise of Human Nature.

扎卡里·戴维斯：1739年，苏格兰哲学家大卫·休谟开始研究人类认知的特性和局限性。他将这些研究的理论与成果写进了即将出版的《人性论》。这本书是最富影响力的哲学著作之一。

Edward Hall: The book is famous for laying out a kind of modest skepticism about the extent of human knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, that has generated one of the most important and durable philosophical puzzles in philosophy of science. My name is Ned Hall. I am a philosopher at Harvard University specializing, to the extent that one has a specialty, in philosophy, in topics in philosophy of science and metaphysics.

爱德华·霍尔：这本书之所以出名，是因为它怀疑了人类知识、乃至科学知识的适用界限。这种怀疑论为科学哲学带来了一个极为重要、也极为难解的哲学难题。我是爱德华·霍尔，在哈佛大学专门从事哲学研究，主要研究科学哲学和形而上学哲学。

Zachary Davis: Hume was writing during the European Enlightenment, a period that emphasized reason and science as the basis for knowledge. Hume applied this approach to the human mind.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这本书写于欧洲启蒙运动时期，当时人们强调科学与理性是获取知识的基础。休谟将科学与理性精神贯彻到了对人类认知的研究中。

Edward Hall: Hume, I think, saw himself as trying to do for the mind what Newton did for the material world, trying to work out basic laws of human thought, and by careful and systematic application of those laws of human thought, come to a kind of comprehensive view about what we humans could and couldn't know.

爱德华·霍尔：牛顿发现了物质世界的基本定律，而休谟想要做的，是发现人类思维世界的基本定律，将其谨慎且系统地应用于现实，从而彻底了解人类可以知道什么、又不可能知道什么。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Ned Hall to discuss David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：100本改变你和世界的书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者探讨一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和爱德华·霍尔教授一起讨论休谟的《人性论》。

Zachary Davis: What do we know about David Hume's life? Where did he come from, and how did he become so interested in philosophy?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您给我们讲讲大卫·休谟的生平吧。他是哪里人？为什么会这么痴迷于哲学？

Edward Hall: He was a Scottish Presbyterian. It's a little unclear from the historical record, but probably an atheist, although somewhat quiet about it because that didn't exactly make you popular in Scotland at the time. You know, he was obviously very, very intelligent. Early on, published the Treatise in his early 20s, which was a kind of insanely ambitious attempt to get to the bottom of the nature of human understanding and human knowledge.

爱德华·霍尔：休谟出生于一个苏格兰长老会家庭。尽管没有确切的历史记载，但他很有可能是一位无神论者。不过他对此很少声张，因为当时无神论在苏格兰并不受待见。他很聪明，二十几岁就出版了《人性论》。透过这本书，你可以看出他雄心勃勃地想要洞察人类认知与知识的本质。

Edward Hall: In his own words, that book “fell stillborn from the press”. But he later on made a very successful career for himself. He was a very widely read and successful historian, in fact, wrote histories of England that were, you know, probably his most popular works during his lifetime. So in a way, his philosophical work was not at the time what brought him renown in the way that his historical work did.

爱德华·霍尔：不过正如他自己所说，这本书“胎死腹中”。好在后来他的事业蒸蒸日上，成为了一名广为人知的历史学家。他的那部《大不列颠史》或许是他生前最受欢迎的著作。因此，在当时，他的哲学著作并没能像他的历史著作一样，让他声名鹊起。

Edward Hall: But he went on to sort of revisit the topics that he addressed in that early work in later works, which have all become classics, like The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is one. Another work, which by his intention was published posthumously and is also justly famous, is the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. And that's probably Exhibit A for thinking that he's an atheist because he kind of puts the boot into a lot of arguments for theism there.

爱德华·霍尔：但他日后依然不懈地探讨《人性论》这部早期作品中的主题，并出版了很多经典之作，如《人类理解研究》和《自然宗教对话录》。在他的要求下，后一本书在他去世之后才出版，但也同样出名。或许正因为他写了这么多批判宗教的作品，人们才会觉得他是无神论者。

Edward Hall: He was, I think, at various points, tried to secure a kind of academic positions at the university of, I'm going to mispronounce this, Edinburgh, but was rebuffed because of concerns about, like his, you know, theological stances. There are other things that are less savory that have come out about him, which I think are sort of fair to note.

爱德华·霍尔：他几次申请爱丁堡大学的教职，但都因为信仰无神论而遭到了拒绝。关于休谟，有一点可能会让人不那么舒服，不过我觉得有必要提出来。

Edward Hall: Like many people notice times he's, like, pretty overtly racist, too, and in ways that may have had some practical effects. So, for us nowadays, I think, properly, when we sort of think about these authors, it's sort of good to think about them in in total, right? Not to lionize them or sort of set them up as these heroic figures. Like, he had plenty to contribute, and his writing is incredibly stimulating, and, you know, he's also flawed in some pretty deep ways.

爱德华·霍尔：很多人也都注意到了这一点。休谟是个公开的种族主义者，甚至还有一些现实影响力。如今我们看待这些伟大作者的时候，必须全面看待，而不是将他们刻意美化或拔高成一个毫无瑕疵的英雄人物。休谟确实有着伟大贡献，他的作品也极具启发性，但在某些观念上他也不可取。

Following in Newton’s footsteps

追随牛顿的脚步

Zachary Davis: So, let's get into the text now. What is the Treatise about, and what was it trying to address?

扎卡里·戴维斯：我们来谈谈这本书吧。《人性论》讲了什么，针对的是什么问题呢？

Edward Hall: So, one thing that's good to keep in mind is that there's a lot of youthful ambition in the Treatise, and it was written after Newton's work had become known and famous.

爱德华·霍尔：我们要注意到，这本书的背后是一个年轻人的雄心壮志，而且这本书写于牛顿的作品出名之后。

Zachary Davis: Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He is most famous for his discoveries about the natural world. He formulated the laws of motion and gravity that laid the foundation for modern physics, and he outlined some of the basic laws of nature. Hume followed in his footsteps, but instead of looking outward at the physical world, Hume turned his gaze inward on the human mind.

扎卡里·戴维斯：艾萨克·牛顿生活于17世纪下半叶和18世纪初期，是一位博学的英国学者，以自然科学领域的成就而闻名。他提出了运动定律和万有引力定律，为现代物理学的发展奠定了基础，还总结了其他许多自然科学的基本定律。休谟追随着他的脚步探索世界，但关注点没有落在物质世界，而是落在了人类思维上。

Edward Hall: So, the aim of the book is “I'm going to give you the laws of thought with sort of central application so that we can understand better the nature of mathematical knowledge, the nature of perceptual knowledge, the nature of scientific and empirical knowledge,” which is where the problem of induction really comes in.

爱德华·霍尔：所以说，《人性论》的写作目的是“结合主要案例，阐明人类思维的基本规律，以便人们更好地理解数学知识、知觉知识、科学知识和经验知识的本质”。这些知识的形成都暴露了归纳法的问题。

Zachary Davis: What is the problem of induction?

扎卡里·戴维斯：归纳法有什么问题呢？

Edward Hall: How do we justify the basic principles on the basis of which we make any prediction about what the world is like? Now, it might not be obvious why there's a problem there. But what Hume noticed is that very roughly, when we make, say, predictions about the future, about what the weather will be like tomorrow, you know, as it may be, we typically do so on the basis of evidence. In fact, we think it's rash, maybe even irrational, to just make some random prediction about the future on no basis at all. That strikes most of us as unscientific.

爱德华·霍尔：我们如何证明，做推测时我们依据的基本原理是是正确的呢？乍一看这些原理并没有问题。但休谟发现，通常我们做推测时，比如当我们推测明天天气如何时，会依据一些迹象。我们会觉得，如果毫无依据的话，这个推测就非常草率、非常不理性，我们会觉得这么做不科学。

Edward Hall: And now if we ask what kind of reasoning process underlies that process of making a prediction, that very mundane, everyday phenomenon of making a prediction about the future, a core part of that, the reasoning process, seems to be our allegiance to some principle of the form: nature, overall, past, present and future is uniform in its operations.

爱德华·霍尔：但在日常生活中，我们推测未来时是如何推理的呢？推理过程中最核心的一点是，我们相信自然齐一性，相信过去、现在、未来事物都按照同一个规律运转。

Zachary Davis: Perhaps in the past you’ve seen dark clouds followed by rain. So, when you see dark clouds again, you assume that rain might be on the way. Perhaps you’ve been near a fire in the past, and you felt that it was hot. So, when you see a fire again, you assume that it will be hot.

扎卡里·戴维斯：也许以前你看到乌云密布，然后就下雨了。于是当你再次看到乌云时，你就会觉得马上要下雨了。也许以前你待在火炉边，觉得很热。于是当你再次看到火时，就觉得会很热。

Edward Hall: So, we take the past to be a guide to the future, and we take it to be a guide, in a way that's sort of deceptively simple to describe but harder to unpack, which is we think the future will be like the past in relevant respects. And now Hume asks, “well, why do we believe that principle? Why do ,we believe that nature is uniform?” And he notices that that very claim about the world has a curious status.

爱德华·霍尔：我们用过去来指导未来，将它看作推测的依据。这种逻辑听上去似乎很简单，但实际上要复杂得多，因为这需要我们相信未来的许多方面会和过去一样。但是休谟却问道：“为什么我们相信未来会一样？为什么我们会相信自然齐一性？”他发现这种对世界的认知有点奇怪。

Edward Hall: On the one hand, it's not a truth of logic or mathematics. I can't just sit down from the armchair and through, like, really, really, really, really clever, deep thinking, come up with some, like, absolutely conclusive proof that the world we inhabit operates in a uniform manner across space and time. On the other hand, if it's a principle or a claim about the world that we learn from experience, then we seem to be involved in a kind of circularity.

爱德华·霍尔：一方面看，自然齐一性并不是什么逻辑或数学公理。我无法仅仅坐在椅子上，用我聪明的大脑袋思考出一个令人信服的答案，来佐证我们生活的世界在不同时空条件下都以齐一的方式运转。另一方面看，如果说它是我们从经验中得出的对于世界运行的原则，那么我们便会陷入循环论证的境地。

Zachary Davis: Think of that fire again. If you put your hand over the fire, you know it will hurt because fire is hot. But how do you know it will hurt? How do you know fire is hot? You know because you have felt it in the past.  So, to form your prediction about the future, you are relying on past experiences. This is called inductive reasoning. But Hume saw a problem with this way of thinking.

扎卡里·戴维斯：再想想那个炉火。你知道要是把手放在火上，手会烧伤，因为火很烫。但你怎么知道手会烧伤呢？你怎么知道火很烫呢？你知道这样，是因为你之前体验过。所以你在推测未来时会依据过去的经验。这一推理过程就是归纳推理。但休谟发现归纳推理有一个问题。

Zachary Davis: You can only rely on experience if the world is orderly enough for you to rely on experience. But the only way to know if the world is orderly is if you can rely on experience. So according to Hume, this whole way of understanding the world means we’re caught in a circular trap. You’re trying to justify inductive reasoning with inductive reasoning, and Hume didn’t think that that was possible.

扎卡里·戴维斯：只有世界完全齐一，你才能仅仅依靠经验来推断。但判断世界是否齐一，依靠的仍然是我们的经验。所以休谟认为，按照这个方式理解世界，我们就会陷入死循环。你是在用归纳推理的方式论证归纳推理的合理性，这么做行不通。

Zachary Davis: Now of course, the prediction would be correct: fire is hot, and the flame would hurt our hand. So, relying on past experiences does save us from potentially harmful situations in the future. Hume wouldn’t disagree, but what he did notice with this thought experiment is that there is a limit to our human knowledge.

扎卡里·戴维斯：当然，现在看推测的结果确实没错：火确实很烫，火焰确实会烧伤我们的手。依靠过去的经验推测未来确实可以让我们避免潜在的伤害，这一点休谟不会否认。但通过这个思想实验，他发现人类的知识的确是有限的。

Edward Hall: I think he's pointing to something deep about the presuppositions we make in even everyday encounters with the world in attempts to figure out what it's going to, you know, bring next. But as for what the aim of the book is, it's nothing less than “I will chart the nature of human cognition, and in doing so, tell you what its limits are”.

爱德华·霍尔：他关注的是我们在日常生活中做推测时，与预设相关的更深层次的问题。至于写《人性论》的目的，无非是“展现人类认知的本质以及局限性”。

Zachary Davis: In Hume’s time, people thought of the mind in a very different way than we do today.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在休谟那个时代，人们思考的方式与如今大不相同。

Edward Hall: Now we tend to think of, at least people in the academy, in psychology departments or neuroscience departments tend to think of having a mind as having a certain kind of complicated physical organ that’s part of your body. And there's still plenty of very, very, very hard problems to work out if you want to flesh out that view.So, for us, the kind of way that the mind-body relation has been configured, has shifted so that the mind is now a sort of locus of these problematic things, problematic because we need to fit them into a sort of physical world view.

爱德华·霍尔：如今我们认为，或者说至少心理学或神经科学研究者认为，人脑是身体的一部分，是一个非常复杂的器官。要想拓展这一认知，还有很多非常困难的问题需要解决。我们这个时代的人对人脑与身体关系的理解已经有所转变，我们认为脑袋中装着这些难以解答的疑惑，而之所以难以解答，是因为我们需要将经验融入对物质世界的理解中。

Edward Hall: And that wasn't necessarily the view back then. It certainly wasn't a dominant view. I think you could probably find that view, but you could also find the view of which Hume is an example which says, no, you really have to start with the mind. And Hume's own philosophy ends up making the physical world look like something like, you know, an illusion that we project onto the course of our experience so as to make more systematic sense of it.

爱德华·霍尔：但休谟那个时代的人并不一定这么认为，这个观点在当时绝对不是主流。或许你也能听到这样的观点，但是你也能听到休谟这样的观点，觉得必须先从大脑思维入手。按照休谟本人的哲学理念来看，物质世界像是一场幻觉，而我们将自己的经验投射到这场幻觉中，从而更系统地理解物质世界。

How does my mind work?

我的思维是如何运转的？

Zachary Davis: Hume’s contemporaries believed that the physical world and the mental world were two different things.

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟的同时代人认为，物质世界和思维世界是两回事。

Edward Hall: The nature of mentality wasn't just viewed as one little special niche topic within the sciences, the way it is now. Like, you look at the academy, and you've got physics, chemistry, biology, you know, climate science, like, neurophysiology, there's one little bit, like psychology, that’s sort of connected, you know.

爱德华·霍尔：当时人们并非像现在这样，把思维与意识的本质看作一个细分的科学话题。如今我们的研究院中，研究的领域有物理学、化学、生物学、气候科学。此外还有两小块领域：一是神经生理学，二是与之相关的心理学。

Edward Hall: That way of thinking about the, where the mind fit into the study of the world was not at all present back then. Like, back then, it would make sense to say, to start out in a way that seems crazy ambitious to us now or maybe just misconceived, “oh, I'm going to figure out the laws of thought, the basic laws of thought.”

爱德华·霍尔：当时对思维的研究还没有隶属于科学研究。所以当时，有人想要雄心勃勃地、或是不甚妥当地“弄清楚思维的基本原理”，便也不足为奇。

Zachary Davis: How did he go about trying to discern those laws? And what is his major argument in the text?

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟得出了哪些基本原理？书中的主要观点是什么？

Edward Hall: So, he does something that is kind of ingenious. And to put it into view, we have to sort of step back and talk a little bit about the skeptical side of Hume. When you read him, and this is part of what makes reading him so dizzying, you will find passages where he is really extolling the use of reason, says reason is great.

爱德华·霍尔：他做了些很巧妙的事。为了发现其巧妙之处，我们不妨先来谈谈休谟的怀疑论思想。读他的著作时，你会发现有一处总叫人摸不着头脑：他在某些段落中极力称赞理性的作用，说理性非常伟大。

Edward Hall: And then you find these other passages where he seems to be, you know, utterly skeptical, almost to the point of nihilism about what reason can teach us. One kind of important kind of corollary to that skepticism about what reason can teach us is a very, very deep skepticism, which he's consistent about, about whether armchair reasoning can teach us much of anything.

爱德华·霍尔：但在另一些段落，他又表现出彻底的怀疑主义，甚至到了虚无主义的程度，认为理性一无是处。他思索理性能带给人们什么，结果不可避免地滑向了怀疑主义，开始质疑仅仅依靠理性是否真的能帮我们理解大多数事物，而这种质疑在他的思想中是一以贯之的。

Zachary Davis: Hume believed that this type of reasoning, which is achieved through pure thought, can lead us to some basic conclusions such as analytic truths. The most famous example of an analytic truth in philosophy is the phrase “all bachelors are unmarried”. By definition, a bachelor is an unmarried man. All unmarried men are unmarried, so all bachelors are unmarried. This is a true statement that can be arrived at just by thinking about the problem.

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟相信，仅靠思考来推理可以帮助我们得出一些基本的结论，比如一些分析真理。哲学中有一个很有名的分析真理的例子，那就是“所有单身汉都未婚”的推理过程。根据定义，单身汉指没有结婚的男人。而所有没结婚的男人都未婚，所以所有单身汉都未婚。这就是一个纯粹依靠思考推理出的正确结论。

Edward Hall: But anything substantial about the nature of reality or your place in it, that has to be thoroughgoingly empirical, you know? You need to collect evidence and reflect on the evidence and sort of work out what it's telling you in order to form a view. And so his own method with respect to the mind is empirical. He claims to come up with some of the laws that he announces that, for example, one of the principles that thought uses, according to him, is association. When you have one idea before your mind, that will tend to call to the mind ideas that are similar to it in some way.

爱德华·霍尔：但是所有涉及现实本质和你在现实中的处境的重要结论，都必须通过经验来确定。你需要收集、反思下结论的依据，弄清其涵义，以便形成观点。休谟自己对于人类思维的思考便是经验式的。他声称自己提出了一些原理，比如阐明思想形成过程的“联想原则”。当你接触到某个观念时，你会以某种形式想起脑海中相似的观念。

Edward Hall: And there are other laws, too, that are never nearly as cleanly spelled out as Newton's, but they're there. But his method of coming to them was really to ask himself, like, “well, if I just look at how my mind works, what principles seem to make the most sense of it? It seems to me that when I think, like, there are ideas before my consciousness, and if I try to explain what principles govern the flow of ideas, well, they're principles like association, you know, similarity between one idea and the next, or space and time. If I tend to think of one thing, that will naturally draw my mind to thinking of things that are near to it.” Or, really he means “that I think are near to it,” which is a complication.

爱德华·霍尔：当然休谟还提出了其他一些原则。这些原则虽然不如牛顿的定律清晰，但至少提出来了。他探索这些原则的方法是自我追问。比如他会问道：“如果我回顾一下自己思维的运转方式，那么哪种原则似乎可以解释得通呢？当我思考的时候，好像会出现很多观念。要是用原则来归纳这些观念的流向，那么可以说成联想原则，也就是两个相似的观念所引发的联想。同样地，时空上的邻近也会引发我们的联想。如果我想到某个事物，脑海中就会不由得想到与之相邻近的事物”，或者准确来说，是“我认为与之相邻近的事物”，不过后面这种讲法就更复杂了。

Edward Hall: But, and then the other one is cause and effect. You know, “I've been habituated by my experience to expect certain things upon seeing certain other things, like I expect that if I put my hand near the hot fire, it will hurt.” It's a really simple example. And so these are, like, three of classic Humean laws, which he thinks he arrives at empirically.

爱德华·霍尔：此外，还有一种原则是因果关系，比如“依据经验，我看到某个事情时，就习惯性地想到另一件事。比如如果我把手放在火旁边，我就会习惯性地觉得手会受伤。”这就是一个简单的因果联想。这三条就是休谟提出的经典原则。他认为，自己是以经验式的方式得出了这些结论。

Edward Hall: And so there's a kind of elegant internal consistency, at least of the effort, like, here are this ambition to come up with laws that are going to, like, tell you what the limits of human knowledge are, among other things. How did you come up with them? Well, by a method that respects those very limits. No, because according to him, those laws will just vindicate the view that we can't learn much from the armchair. And so, good, he'd better have a story about how he comes up with them that doesn't require much work from the armchair.

爱德华·霍尔：这展现了一种美妙的内部一致性，至少他的论证方式与他的理念是一致的。他仿佛在告诉读者，我大胆提出了一些原理，展现了人类思维有何局限。至于他是如何得出这些原理的？他尊重了思维的局限性，因为这些原理恰恰证明，我们无法从纯粹思考中收获很多知识。既然如此，他最好讲讲，他是如何没有经过大量思考推理，就得出了这些原理。

You can never know cause and effect

你永远无法知晓因果

Zachary Davis: So what, what is he saying about cause and effect, and why does that seem so counterintuitive? You know, is he right about, like, the impossibility of knowing cause and effect?

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟如何看待因果关系？为什么他的因果论看上去有违常理？他说我们无法知道真正的因果，真的是这样吗？

Edward Hall: I think he's right that it's way more complicated than people tend to think. So, if we sort of zero in on just cause and effect, as opposed to, like, the general question of how we predict things, one question that's going to be uppermost for Hume that runs throughout the Treatise, throughout the book, is the question where do our concepts come from?

爱德华·霍尔：我觉得他说的没错，因果关系比我们平常以为的复杂得多。如果关注因果本身，不去想如何推测未来这个大问题，你就会心生疑问，想要知道为什么我们脑海中会有因果关系的概念？这个问题也是贯穿《人性论》一书的重要话题。

Edward Hall: Now, part of Hume's kind of focus on the empirical is, convinces him—and this is announced right at the beginning of the Treatise as a basic methodological point—convinces him that the only place our concepts can come from is our own, kind of, conscious impressions.

爱德华·霍尔：休谟非常关注经验对认识的影响，他觉得我们之所以会有因果关系的概念，是因为我们有相关的印象。他在《人性论》的开头便将这一点作为基本理论提了出来。

Edward Hall: So, he says, look, there's this observable difference between impressions, which are extremely vivid and have a lot of vivacity, and ideas, which are often faint. And he endorses what he calls a “copy principle,” which is if you have an idea, something that you can sort of call to mind at will and think by means of which, that idea must had its source in an impression.

爱德华·霍尔：他说，印象与观念区别明显，印象生动丰富，观念却往往很模糊。他认同“复制原则”。所谓“复制原则”，就是如果你脑海中有一个观念，那么这个观念一定源于与之对应的印象。

Edward Hall: And you can feel some intuitive force for this, like someone, for example, who was, say, blind from birth in a way that deprive them of any visual experience at all, we think might not have any concept of color. Now, they might hear the word, and they might be able to use it fluently in conversation with other people. But you might think, like, there's a sense in which, like the concept of red is something they can't grasp as the way normally-sighted people can. And you can think of Hume as kind of generalizing that principle.

爱德华·霍尔：你可以从中感受到某种直觉般的力量。假如一个人从出生起就失明了，因此从未有过任何视觉经验，对任何色彩可能都没有概念。他可能会听到描述色彩的词，和别人聊天时也可以自如地使用这些词。但他无法像普通人一样理解“红色”这样的概念。你可以把“复制原则”看作对这种情况的概括。

Edward Hall: And now you think, okay, whether or not you agree with the principle, you should think it's a good question. How do we come by our concepts? And how do we come by, say, our concept of causation in particular? What is it to think of that transaction between the billiard balls as not merely a succession of events, but one with a kind of causal nexus where the impact makes the second billiard ball move, like, causes it to move? And Hume thinks he can convince you that when you really try to investigate where that concept comes from, you'll find an answer, but it won't be the answer you expected.

爱德华·霍尔：现在，不论你是否认同这一原则，你都会觉得这个问题不错。那么，我们如何产生了这些概念？特别是，我们如何产生了因果关系的概念？为什么我们不把台球间的撞击看作一连串随机事件，而是觉得是因果关系使得第二个台球运动了？休谟说，他可以告诉你为什么人脑中会有因果关系的概念，但他的解释恐怕和你预料的有所不同。

Zachary Davis: Imagine you’re playing pool and you hit the cue ball. The cue ball then rolls across the table and strikes the 8 ball, which then rolls into the corner pocket. The obvious way to read this situation is that the cue ball hit the 8 ball and caused it to roll into the corner pocket. Cause and effect.

扎卡里·戴维斯：假设你在打台球。你击中了母球，母球在桌子上滚动，击中了八号球，八号球入袋。对此，我们一般会这么解读：母球击中八号球，使得八号球入袋。我们把它解读为因果关系。

Zachary Davis: Hume says that this experience shows us two parts. Part A is that you hit the cue ball and it rolled and struck the 8 ball. Part B is that the 8 ball rolled toward the corner pocket. But according to Hume, these experiences are not necessarily connected—our mind is the thing that combines them. For all we know, these two parts could be unrelated but have always occurred together in that order. This is what Hume calls constant conjunction: two parts that are always seen together.

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟说，这个例子中共有两个事件：事件A是你击中母球，母球滚动并击中八号球；事件B是八号球滚向球袋。他认为这两件事不一定有关联。把它们关联起来的是我们的大脑，因为我们发现就算这两步不一定相关，但也总是先后发生。这就是休谟所说的“恒常连结”，也就是两件事总是接连发生。

Zachary Davis: Hume believed that our minds add something to this situation that connects these two parts. We assume cause and effect, but in reality, all that our experience has shown us is the occurrence of part A followed by part B.

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟认为我们的大脑为这两件事添加了某种关系，使它们关联在一起。我们推测它们之间是因果关系，但实际上经验表明仅仅是发生的先后关系。

Zachary Davis: Hume didn’t really believe that the cue ball didn’t cause the 8 ball to roll into the corner pocket. But what this shows us is that our mind fills in the gaps in our experience. We cannot assume anything we know with any kind of certainty because we cannot see the glue that holds the two parts together.

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟并不是真的认为母球不是八号球入袋的原因。但他的因果论观点让我们发现，大脑竟然会自动填补经验所得信息的空缺。我们无法肯定自己知晓的任何事情，因为我们不知道大脑是否悄悄地将两个毫不相关的事情联系到了一起。

Edward Hall: It's controversial how to read Hume here because he's not perfectly clear. On my reading of him, what he's trying to get us to see is that that psychological expectation is not answering to anything in the world beyond mere constant conjunction. So, if you want to see, find some extra ingredient out in the world that, never mind how we think about things, out in the world, these things are really connected in a way that two things that are merely correlated or not, if that's your goal, he thinks that's hopeless.

爱德华·霍尔：人们对于如何解读休谟的这一观点尚有争议，因为他本人也没有阐释清楚。在我看来，他是想让我们明白这种心理预期只会由“恒常连结”引起，但它并不指向现实世界中的任何实际关联。因此，如果你想要探讨的不是我们如何认识事物，而是想要寻找客观世界中两件事物之间是否真的存在着关联性，那你多半找不到。

Edward Hall: It's not just that it's hopeless. You are like, you literally have no idea what you're talking about because you never observe that extra glue or that extra connection. And nothing in your experience could serve as a source for the idea of that extra necessary connection.

爱德华·霍尔：不仅仅是找不到，你其实都没有意识到自己在说什么，因为你永远无法意识到大脑会产生这种额外的关联。而从经验中，我们也无法得出恒常连结的两件事之间存在必然的因果关系。

Edward Hall: And that's quite radical. I mean, if you could do it like a little experiment with yourself, you could, like, you know, take something like this cap. I'm holding up a cap, and I'm about to let go of it. And I can't help but expect that it's going to fall. In fact, the way I think about it is not just that, as a matter of fact, when I let it go, it's going to fall. Here, see, it just did.

爱德华·霍尔：这是一个全新的观点。如果你愿意拿自己做个小实验，可以拿一个东西，比如像我一样抓着一顶帽子，然后准备松手。这时候我自然会想帽子会掉下去。但其实，在思考的时候，我想的不仅仅是：我松手时帽子会掉下去。看，它现在真的掉了。

Edward Hall: But in fact, it had to. It had to fall. It was guaranteed to fall, given the physical circumstances. Given its physical circumstances and gravity, there was nothing that could happen but that it fall. Right? All that modal talk about “it had to fall”, “there's nothing that could happen but that it fall”, it's very natural for me to think that that talk answers to something in the world, you know, that I'm correctly, by use of that talk, describing some feature of that little episode that goes beyond the mere fact that I let go, and it did fall. Right?

爱德华·霍尔：实际上我会想，它绝对会掉下去，绝对如此，因为物理环境与重力作用会造成这一结果，不会出现别的情况。我这里用的这些情态动词，像“肯定，绝对会掉”，在我看来自然是真实情况的写照。我使用的这种说法、这些情态动词所描述的远远超过一个简简单单的事实，那就是“我松手了，帽子掉了”。

Edward Hall: And that, on my reading of Hume anyways, is just a deep mistake that we can't make any sense of what that extra ingredient is. And I should say, that element of Hume, along with the problem of induction that we talked about before, has had incredible staying power. People nowadays in philosophy who worry about, like, “What's causation?” or “What are laws of nature?”—you know, because in a way, those turned out to be, at bottom, the same topic here at least—really worry about like, well, if we think by calling something a law of nature, we're doing something that goes beyond simply saying it always holds. What is that? What could that extra thing be, you know? And the worry stems, traces back to Hume.

爱德华·霍尔：然而，从我对休谟的理解来看，这种想法其实是大错特错：因为我们并不能真正理解这种额外的因果关联是什么。而且不得不说，休谟的因果论观点和之前提到的关于归纳法的观点都影响深远。如今的哲学研究者会担心什么是因果关系、什么是自然法则——因为在这个语境下，因果论和自然法则归根结底讨论的是同一件事情——他们所追问的其实是，究竟是什么让这些自然法则可以永远成立？是什么赋予它以必然性？而我们担心的这些，都可以追溯到休谟指出的问题。

Zachary Davis: Wow, yeah, it raises so many questions.

扎卡里·戴维斯：没错，这确实引发了许多问题。

Edward Hall: Hume’s own view by the way, just to interject here, is that if you think too long and hard about these things, you will get you depressed, and at some point you need to take a break and go down to the pub with your friends and have a pint. And he was actually pretty serious about that.

爱德华·霍尔：顺便说一下休谟自己的看法。他觉得，如果你对这些事情思考得太久太认真，就很容易闷闷不乐。有时候你需要歇一歇，去酒馆跟朋友喝两杯。他这么说可不是在开玩笑。

Zachary Davis: That's pretty sensible.

扎卡里·戴维斯：还挺明智的。

Edward Hall: Yeah.

爱德华·霍尔：确实。

Why should Einstein say thanks to Hume?

爱因斯坦为什么应该感谢休谟？

Zachary Davis: Could you start to tell us about how have his ideas entered the world? How have they changed the way we think about science or our minds or any other questions?

扎卡里·戴维斯：他的这些观点对世界有什么影响？它们如何改变了我们对科学、人脑思维等方面的看法呢？

Edward Hall: So, Einstein, in developing his theory of relativity, said that he was explicitly influenced by Hume. And it's not so much Hume on causation. It's more the Hume’s technique of asking “How is your concept of X, whatever X is, grounded in experience?” You know? So there's something very liberating about that, that move, like, “Now you say you have some, like, central concept that organizes the way you theorize or think about some subject matter. Great. Tell me where that concept came from, how it's anchored in the kind of empirical experience you've had.”

爱德华·霍尔：爱因斯坦提出相对论时，坦言自己显然受到了休谟的影响。影响他的倒不一定是因果论，更多的是休谟的一个问题背后的思路，这个问题是：如果你脑海中有概念X，不论X是什么，你是如何基于经验得出这个概念的？这个问题打开了思路，像是在对你说：“既然你说你有一些核心概念，可以将某些主题理论化、或是帮助你思考它们。那么不妨告诉我这个概念从何而来，是如何取自你的经验的？”

Edward Hall: And what's liberating about that is, like, it allows you to play around with other ways to fashion a concept that might be better grounded in your experience than the one you started with. And there are all sorts of areas in which that can be highly liberating. But for Einstein, at least, by his own admission, was thinking about the concepts of space and especially time and motion and velocity, like, how do we think about those?

爱德华·霍尔：它打开了思路，是因为它让你可以用别的方式来形成一个概念，这个概念比你一开始想的更贴近你的经验。它还可以为各个领域打开思路。而对于爱因斯坦来说，他承认休谟的观点帮助他思考了空间、时间、运动和速度这些概念，对思考后三个概念的帮助尤其明显。

Zachary Davis: Hume opened the door for questioning our experiences, and thus questioning our most basic assumptions.

扎卡里·戴维斯：休谟引导我们质疑自己的经验，进而质疑自己最基本的假设。

Edward Hall: And so for Einstein, that was liberating in just the way he needed to be liberated.

爱德华·霍尔：对爱因斯坦来说，这刚好以他需要的方式打开了他的思路。

Zachary Davis: What aspects of life today that we encounter in ordinary talk and ordinary thinking, do you find resonant with Hume's ideas? Like, in what way did he build the way, did he build our common sense?

扎卡里·戴维斯：如今我们日常交流、思考时，哪些情况下会想到休谟的观点呢？他如何影响了我们思考的方式与认知？

Edward Hall: So, I think one thing he definitely helped to do, is build up the kind of the central importance that many people think just empirical experience has. That's a kind of lasting legacy. It was also promoted by other people like Locke, certainly, and I'm sure was in the air, you know. But the kind of modesty about what we can find out about just relying on our own sort of raw cognitive powers, the deep modesty about that is, I think, a lasting legacy.

爱德华·霍尔：我觉得休谟带来的一大影响就是，把人的经验摆在了核心位置。这是一笔长久的精神财富。洛克等人也推崇了这一观点，我相信它曾备受欢迎。休谟还展现了仅仅依靠基本的思维推断得出的认识是多么有限，而对这一限度的深深觉察在我看来是一笔长久的财富。

Edward Hall: And it's not like it's universal. But you see traces of it in just the thought, like, look, if I announce something, it's often appropriate to say, “Well, what's your evidence for that?” You know? Like, “Can you show me the data?” And so on. And you know, that kind of approach can be used as a bludgeon. And it can be sort of, it can dumb people down as much as elevate them, but that's something that I see as the kind of intellectual humility and modesty coupled with a kind of, sort of deep reliance on experience as a guide to, you know, what the reality that we share is like.

爱德华·霍尔：这种影响虽然不普遍，但你可以感受得到。比如我在宣布某件事的时候，人们会问我有没有证据支持、能不能展示一下数据等等。这种提问方式可以运用于辩论之中，既有可能提升人们的素养，也有可能让言语变得更简单易懂。我觉得这可以让人们在思想上保持谦逊，想要通过经验而非纯粹的思维判断，来认识我们所处的现实世界。

Zachary Davis: David Hume paved the way for contemporary cognitive science, influenced countless other philosophers and scientists, and gave us a framework for understanding how experience shapes what we know. Hume expanded our understanding of the mind, and opened the door to even bigger questions on the nature of human knowledge, but his skepticism and the questions he raised regarding inductive reasoning remain a puzzle to this day. We still can’t quite justify how we know what we know.

扎卡里·戴维斯：大卫·休谟为当代认知科学奠定了基础，影响了无数哲学家和科学家，并为我们阐明了一套理念，让我们理解了经验会如何塑造我们的认知。休谟拓展了我们对思维的认识，引领这我们去思考人类知识的本质等更宏大的问题。不过直到如今，也没有人能解答他的怀疑论以及对归纳法的质疑。我们仍然无法证明我们如何知道自己知道什么。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Galen Beebe, Jack Pombriant and me, Zachary Davis, with help from Liza French, Ariel Liu, Wendy Wu, and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！