如何避免愚蠢的见解
伯特兰·罗素
1 黝帘石To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.
要避免人们常常产生的各种愚蠢的观点，并不需要过人的天赋。立几条简单的规则就可以使得你避免荒唐的错误，虽然不能避免一切错误。
2 张仲瀚If the mater is one that can be ttled by obrvation, make the obrvation yourlf. 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 becau 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 mylf that hedgehogs eat balck beetles, becau I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit mylf until I had en one enjoying this unappeti
zing 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 becau he had never en one of them.
如果事情可以通过观察来解决的， 那你就亲自观察好了。亚里斯多德认为女人的牙齿比男人少，其实很简单，只需请亚里斯多德夫人张一张口来让他数一数，他本是可以不犯这一错误的。他没有那么做，因为他认为他知道。自以为懂而实际并不懂是一种致命的错误，我们都易犯这种错误。我自己相信，刺猬吃黑甲虫，因为人们告诉我，它们是这样的。但如果我要写一本论述刺猬习性的书的话，那么在我未亲眼看到一个刺猬享受这种倒胃口的食品之前，我是不会动笔的。然而，亚里斯多德却不够谨慎。古代和中世纪的作家谈起独角兽和火蛇来如数家珍， 但他们中没有一个人认为，因为自身从未见过这些东西的任一种，而有必要避免对它们作武断的阐述。
3 Many matters, however are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matter, there are ways in which you can make yourlf 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 some one 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 tho about matters as to which there no good evidence either way. Percution is ud in theology, not in arithmetic, becau in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourlf 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.
但是，许多事情是不那么容易用经验来检验的。如果像大多数人那样，在此类事情上执迷不误，那么有许多方法可以使你自己认识到自己的偏见。如果某一种与你相左的见解使你生气，那么这就是一种迹象，说明你潜意识地感到，你没法给自己的想法以充分的理由。倘若有人坚称，2加2等于5，冰岛是在赤道上，你只会感到同情而不是愤怒，除非你对算术或地理知之甚少，以致他的观点动摇了你的立场。最激烈的争沦是对那些双方都没有充分证据的事物的争论。迫害事件仅发生于神学领域，而不见于算术领域，因为在算术
天庭剩女中有知识，而在神学中仅有观点。因此当你发现你自己对不同的意见气恼时，你一定要警惕；通过检验你或将发现，你的信念并无足够的依据。音名是什么
4 平安理赔 A good way of riding yourlf of certain kinds of dogmatism is to be come 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, ek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If the people and the newspaper em mad, perver, and wicked, remind yourlf that you em so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution.
使你自己摆脱某些教条主义的一种好方法是去了解与你不同的社会集团所持的意见。我年轻时常居住在国外，在法国、德国、意大利和美国。我发现这对于消弥特定的偏见很有帮助。如果你无法远行，那就找一些与你意见相左的人，读一读不属于你们党派的报纸。如果这些人和报纸看上去疯狂、荒谬和恶劣，那么请提醒你自己，在他们看来，你可能也是如此。
日落照片>高中语文答题技巧5 For tho who have enough psychological imagination, it is a 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 to the same limitations of time or space. Mahatma Gandhi deplores railways and steamboats and machinery; he would like to undo the whole of the industrial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting any one who holds this opinion, becau in Western countries most people take the advantage 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 arguments that occur to you by considering what Gandhi might say 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 mylf growing less dogmatic and cocksure through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical opponent.
对于那些想象力丰富的人来说，假设与观点不同的人进行辩论，不失为一种好方法。较之与对手进行面对面的谈话，这种方式有一个好处，可以说是唯一的好处：它不会受到时
情诗古代间和空间的限制。有时，由于这种假想的对话，结果，我真的改变了我的想法。 而有时虽然未能真的改变看法，我也常发现自己因为认识到假想对手可能有道理而变得不那么武断或自以为是了。
6 Be very wary of opinions that flatter your lf-esteem. Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own x. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and mean of science are male; if you are a woman, you can retort that so are most criminals. The question is inherently insoluble, but lf-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 other. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits possd by our nation are the rally 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 lf-esteem of man as man, becau we cannot argue out the matter with some nonhuman mind. The only way I kno
w of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourlves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the univer, and that for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to ourlves as we are to jellyfish.
