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  3. In every philosophical problem, our investigation starts from what may be cal

In every philosophical problem, our investigation starts from what may be cal

游客2025-03-30  9
问题    In every philosophical problem, our investigation starts from what may be called "data", 【T1】by which I mean matters of common knowledge, vague, complex, inexact, as common knowledge always is, but yet somehow commanding our assent as on the whole and in some interpretation pretty certainly true. In the ease of our present problem, the common knowledge involved is of various kinds. There is first our acquaintance with particular objects of daily life — furniture, houses, towns, other people, and so on. Then there is the extension of such particular knowledge to particular things outside our personal experience through history and geography, newspapers, etc. And lastly, there is the systematization of all this knowledge of particulars by means of physical science, which derives immense persuasive force from its astonishing power of foretelling the future. We are quite willing to admit that there may be errors of detail in this knowledge, 【T2】but we believe them to be discoverable and corrigible by the methods which have given rise to our beliefs, and we do not, as practical men, entertain for a moment the hypothesis that the whole edifice may be built on insecure foundations. In the main, therefore, and without absolute dogmatism as to this or that special portion, we may accept this mass of common knowledge as affording data for our philosophical analysis.
   The first thing that appears when we begin to analyse our common knowledge is that some of it is derivative, while some is primitive; 【T3】that is to say, there is some that we only believe because of something else from which it has been inferred in some sense, though not necessarily in a strict logical sense, while other parts are believed on their own account, without the support of any outside evidence. It is obvious that the senses give knowledge of the latter kind: the immediate facts perceived by sight or touch or hearing do not need to be proved by argument, but are completely self-evident. 【T4】Psychologists, however, have made us aware that what is actually given in sense is much less than most people would naturally suppose, and that much of what at first sight seems to be given is really inferred. This applies especially in regard to our space-perceptions. For instance, we instinctively infer the "real" size and shape of a visible object from its apparent size and shape, according to its distance and our point of view. When we hear a person speaking, our actual sensations usually miss a great deal of what he says and we supply its place by unconscious inference; in a foreign language, where this process is more difficult, we find ourselves apparently grown dear; requiring, for example, to be much nearer the stage at a theater than would be necessary in our own country. Thus the first step in the analysis of data, namely, the discovery of what is really given in sense, is full of difficulty. We will, however, not linger on this point; so long as existence is realized, the exact outcome does not make any very great difference in our main problem.
   The next step in our analysis must be the consideration of how the derivative parts of our common knowledge arise. Here we become involved in a somewhat puzzling entanglement of logic and psychology. 【T5】Psychologically, a belief may be called derivative whenever it is caused by one or more other beliefs, or by some fact of sense which is not simply what the belief asserts. Derivative beliefs in this sense constantly arise without any process of logical inference, merely by association of ideas or some equally extra-logical process. From the expression of a man’s face we judge as to what he is feeling: we say we see that he is angry, when in fact we only see a frown. We do not judge as to his state of mind by any logical process: the judgment grows up, often without our being able to say what physical mark of emotion we actually saw. In such a case, the knowledge is derivative psychologically; but logically it is in a sense primitive, since it is not the result of any logical deduction. There may or may not be a possible deduction leading to the same result, but whether there is or not, we certainly do not employ it. If we call a belief "logically primitive" when it is not actually arrived at by a logical inference, then innumerable beliefs are logically primitive which psychologically are derivative. [br] 【T3】
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答案 也就是说，我们只相信某些知识，是因为它们在某种意义上是从某种别的知识推论出来的，虽然未必是精确的逻辑推论；而另外那部分知识之所以被相信是由于其自身的原因，无须任何外部证据的支持。
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