Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy
物理学家们，请别再对哲学说蠢话了

作者：Sean Carroll @ 2014-6-23
译者：Luis Rightcon(@Rightcon)
校对：斑马（@鹿兔马朦）、史祥莆（@史祥莆）、张三（@老子毫无动静的坐着像一段呆木头）
来源：Sean Carroll个人博客，http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/23/physicists-should-stop-saying-silly-things-about-philosophy/

The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well-known examples.

过去几年，数位著名科学家跳出来贬低哲学的价值，其中广为人知的有Stephen Hawking，Lawrence Krauss和Neil de Grasse Tyson。

To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them.

为了平衡一下这种偏见，一位物理学哲学家Wayne Myrvold请一些物理学家解释一下，为什么与哲学家沟通对他们自己的研究有所助益。

I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.

我是其中一个受访者，你可以在Rotman Institute Blog上读到我的回答。我本打算把我的回答直接发布在这里，不过还是让我尝试用不同的话再叙述一遍吧。

Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing.

大体而言，物理学家倾向于对哲学持有三种简单粗暴的批评：一种纯属愚蠢，另一种非常讨厌，最后一种则让人沮丧。

• “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”
• 哲学对收集实验数据漠不关心，却试图依靠纯粹的思考来理解世界

This is the totally dopey criticism. Yes, most philosophers do not actually go out and collect data (although there are exceptions). But it makes no sense to jump right from there to the accusation that philosophy completely ignores the empirical information we have collected about the world.

这是非常愚蠢的批判。没错，多数哲学家确实不会走出去收集数据（但也有例外）。但是由此出发直接得出这样的指责：哲学完全忽视了我们所获得的有关世界的经验数据——是毫无意义的。

When science (or common-sense observation) reveals something interesting and important about the world, philosophers obviously take it into account. (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)

当科学（或者日常观察）显示了一些有关世界的有趣和重要的事情时，哲学家当然会认真对待。（题外话：当然存在一些糟糕的哲学家，他们尽做蠢事，就像每个领域总会有糟糕的从业者一样。还是让我们专注于那些为数众多的杰出人物吧 ）

Philosophers do, indeed, tend to think a lot. This is not a bad thing. All of scientific practice involves some degree of “pure thought.” Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist.

相较于实践，哲学家的确倾向于思考得更多，但这并不是件坏事。一切科学实践都或多或少地涉及一些“纯粹性的思考”。哲学家本身的职业属性决定了，他们对那些基本问题要更感兴趣，而对于这些问题的研究，有关经验事实的一点最新小动静，对于哲学家来说，远不如对那些通过建模研究现象的学者来得重要。

But at its best, the practice of philosophy of physics is continuous with the practice of physics itself. Many of the best philosophers of physics were trained as physicists, and eventually realized that the problems they cared most about weren’t valued in physics departments, so they switched to philosophy.

尽管如此，在最佳实践中，物理学哲学的工作始终紧随物理学工作本身。很多杰出的物理学哲学家受过成为物理学家所需要的训练，但最终他们意识到自己最关注的问题在一般的物理系不受到重视，所以他们转向了哲学。

But those problems — the basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels — are just physics problems, really. And some amount of rigorous thought is necessary to make any progress on them. Shutting up and calculating isn’t good enough.

但这些问题——物理实在之最深层终极结构的基本性质——这恰恰就是物理问题。对于这样的问题，一些来自哲学家的慎密思考，对于取得进展都是必需的。仅仅闷头计算是不够的。

• “Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”
• 哲学对于一个物理学家的日常工作没有丝毫用处

Now we have the frustratingly annoying critique. Because: duh. If your criterion for “being interesting or important” comes down to “is useful to me in my work,” you’re going to be leading a fairly intellectually impoverished existence. Nobody denies that the vast majority of physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. (“We need to calculate this loop integral! Quick, get me a philosopher!”)

然后是这种特别使人厌烦的批评了。因为：嗯，要是你对于“有趣或重要”的标准低到了“对我的工作有用”，那你的智力水准显然是有往日益贫乏方向发展的趋势。没人否认绝大多数物理学家所取得的成功并没有来自哲学的贡献。（“我们需要计算这个环路积分,快给我找个哲学家来！”）

But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it’s a handmaiden to physics. I think that philosophers themselves sometimes get too defensive about this, trying to come up with reasons why philosophy is useful to physics. Who cares?

但是生物学，历史学和文学对其也同样没有贡献。哲学有趣，是因为它本身的内在趣味，而不是作为物理学仆人的用处。我认为哲学家们自己有时对这一点也太过于坚持了，试图找出为什么哲学会对物理学有用。管它呢。

Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on.

尽管如此，还是有一些物理学问题是哲学知识可以派得上用场的。一些基础性问题，例如量子测量（测不准原理），时间之箭【译注：意为时间的不可逆性，是由英国天体物理学家亚瑟·爱丁顿提出的一个概念】，概率的本质等等。

Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes.

又一次，很大部分工作中的物理学家并不需要操心这些问题，但是我们中的某些人会啊！而且，坦率地说，如果有更多在这些领域笔耕的物理学家能够花点时间和哲学家交流一下，那么他们将可以避免犯下许多低级错误。

• “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”
• 哲学家们过于关心深层次的元问题，而不是专注于那些可以明确观察和计算的问题

Finally, the deeply depressing critique. Here we see the unfortunate consequence of a lifetime spent in an academic/educational system that is focused on taking ambitious dreams and crushing them into easily-quantified units of productive work.

最后是这种让人沮丧的批评。我们在此看到的是这样一些不幸的人，他们把一生时间花在了适应学术/教育系统，那个致力于攫取人们的梦想，然后碾碎，把它变成一些针对单纯的重复性生产任务的容易量化的单元的系统。

The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem.

他们的想法显然是这样的：为计算一个特定波函数而开发一种新技术，是值得支持的荣耀事业，而尝试去理解波函数到底是什么以及它们如何刻画了现实，则是浪费时间。我怀疑绝大多数在日常工作中使用量子力学的物理学家，对试图理解量子测量问题的行为，要么不感兴趣，要么完全反对。

This makes me sad. I don’t know about all those other folks, but personally I did not fall in love with science as a kid because I was swept up in the romance of finding slightly more efficient calculational techniques. Don’t get me wrong — finding more efficient calculational techniques is crucially important, and I cheerfully do it myself when I think I might have something to contribute. But it’s not the point — it’s a step along the way to the point.

这令我寒心。我不太了解其他同行的情况，就我个人而言，并未在少年时代就着迷于科学，是因为我当时被卷入了寻找更高效计算技术的潮流——不要误解，这项技术是非常重要的——，当我认为自己也许会在那方面有所贡献时，我就积极参与到了这项研究中。但是无论对于我个人还是整个科学，这都不是重点——它只是在通往真正重要的研究道路上的一步。

The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works. Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway. And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things.

依我看，真正重要的东西，是去理解世界是怎样运转的。知道怎样去计算是其中一部分，但更重要的是考虑那些关于为什么是这样，这意味着什么的问题。这些问题才是科学中吸引我的部分。完成这个任务，其中的一部分就是理解我们对于世界的物理学刻画中作为基础的那部分，深入挖掘那些仅凭计算远远无法解决的的问题。

It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest. The universe is much bigger than we are and stranger than we tend to imagine, and I for one welcome all the help we can get in trying to figure it out.

令人遗憾的是，太多物理学家忽视了科学哲学在这样的探索中所能作出的贡献。世界的广度远大于我们，其复杂神奇之处也远超我们的想象，我谨代表个人欢迎在探索它的过程中来自所有我们可能得到的所有帮助。

（编辑：辉格@whigzhou）

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——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

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