HOW TO AVOID FOOLISH OPINIONS

Bertrand Russell

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind is prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

如何避免愚蠢的观点

伯特兰·罗素

    要避免人类易于生产的各种愚蠢观点，不需要超人的天赋。几个简单规则就会使你即使不能避免所有的错误，也能避免愚蠢的错误。

   If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them.

    如果可以通过观察来解决问题，那你就自己进行观察。亚里士德本可以通过请求亚里士多德夫人张开嘴，数一下就能避免以为女人的牙齿要比男人的牙齿少的错误。他没有这样做是因为他认为他知道。认为你知道，而事实上你不知道是一种我们都易于犯的致命错误。我自以为，刺猬吃黑甲虫，因我被告知它们吃黑甲虫，但如果我要写一本有关刺猬习性的书，我就应该在我见过一只刺猬享受这种难吃的食物后才这样写。然而，亚里士多德却少了点谨慎。古代和中世纪的作者都了解独角兽和火蜥蜴的一切；他们中没有一人考虑过有必要避免对它们的武断陈述，因为他从未见过它们。

Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.

然而，许多事情并不那么容易接受经验的检验。像大多数人类一样，如果你对许多这样的事有强烈的信念，你就有许多方法使你自己意识到自己的偏见。如果一种观点与你自己的相反，使你愤怒，这就是一个信号，你已下意识地意识到你的思考并无充分的理由。如果有人坚持认为二加二等于五，或者冰岛在赤道上，你会感到怜悯而不是愤怒，除非你不懂计算和没有地理知识，以至于他的观点动摇了你自己反对的信念。最激烈的争论往往是双方都没有很好证据的那些事情。神学中使用迫害，计算中没有，因为在计算中有知识，但在神学中只有观点。所以，当你发现自己因不同的观点而愤怒时，你就要警惕；通过审视，你可能会发现你的信念已超出了合理的证据。

A good way of riding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. When I was young, I lived much outside my own country—in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. I found this very profitable in diminishing the intensity of insular prejudice. If you cannot travel, seek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If the people and the newspaper seem mad, perverse, and wicked, remind yourself that you seem so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution.

让自己摆脱某些武断的好方法是意识到社交圈中持有的与你不同的观点。我年轻时在国外生活了很长时间---在法国、德国、意大利和美国。我发现这在减少狭隘的偏见方面很有用。如果你无法去旅行，那就找与你意见不同的人，读些与你不同党派的报纸。如果那些人和报纸看上去狂热、反常且令人不快，就要提醒自己，你对他们而言看上去也是如此。从这种观点看，双方可能都是对的，但不可能都是错的。这种反思应该引起我们一定的谨慎。

For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias. This has one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with opponents; this one advantage is that the method is not subject the same limitations of time and space. Mahatma Gandhi deplored railways and steamboats and machinery; he would have liked to undo the whole of the industrial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting anyone who holds this opinion, because in Western countries most people take the advantages of modern technique for granted. But if you want to make sure that you are right in agreeing with the prevailing opinion, you will find it a good plan to test the argument that occur to you by considering what Gandhi might have said in refutation of them. I have sometimes been led actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue, and, short of this, I have frequently found myself growing less dogmatic and cocksure through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical opponent.

对那些拥有足够心理想象力的人来说，想象一番与有不同偏见的人的争论是个不错的计划。同与对手的实际谈话相比，这有个好处，而且是唯一的好处；这唯一的好处就是，这种方法同样不受时间和空间的限制。圣雄甘地强烈反对铁路、轮船和机械；他本想毁掉整个工业革命。你可能从未有机会真地遇见持有这种观点的人，因为在西方国家，大多数人认为现代技术的好处是理所当然的。但如果你想确定你赞同的普遍观点是对的，那你会发现，通过想象甘地会说什么来反驳它们，这是检验争论的一个不错的计划。由于这种虚构的对话，实际上，有时我已被引导着改变了我的想法，除此之外，通过了解一个假想对手可能的合理性，我经常发现自己变得没有那么武断和过分自信了。

By very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem. Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own sex. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are woman, you can retort that so are most criminals. The question is inherently insoluble, but self-esteem conceals this from most people. We are all, whatever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our own nation is superior to all others. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are comparatively trivial. Here, again, the rational man will admit that the question is one to which there is no demonstrably right answer. It is more difficult to deal with the self-esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the matter with some non-human mind. The only way I know of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to ourselves as we are to jelly-fish.

要非常警惕恭维你自尊的那些评价。无论男人和女人，十有八九都坚信其自身性别的优势。双方都有充足的理由。如果你是男人，你会指出大多数诗人和科学家都是男性；而如果你是女人，你会反驳说大多数罪犯也都是男性。这个问题在本质上是无解的，但自尊遮盖了这点。无论我们来自世界什么地方，我们所有的人都会相信我们自己的国家要比其它的国家更优越。由于每个国家都有其独特的优点和缺点，而我们调整了我们的价值标准来证明我们国家所拥有的优点才是真正重要的优点，而其缺点相对来说是微不足道的。在此，理性的人同样会承认这是个没有明显正确答案的问题。更难以处理的是身为人类的人的自尊，因为我们无法与某些非人类的想法进行辩论。对待这种人类普遍的自负，我知道的就是提醒我们自己，人只是宇宙的一个小角落中一颗小行星生命中的短暂片断，宇宙的其它部分可能包含了比我们更优越的存在，就像我们比水母更优越一样。

                                    From Unpopular Essays

                                     (Allen & Unwin, 1950)

                                    选自《不流行的随笔》

                               （艾伦与昂温出版公司，1950年）

                                                                          2023年3月23日译

（译者注：该文选自ENGLISH THROUGH READING《英语精读文选》1982年