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来源Antoine Arnauld: Precision of thought is essential to every aspect and walk of life
译者不喜开封菜
Antoine Arnauld 1612–1694 Precision of thought is essential to every aspect and walk of life Last-born son of a lawyer who fathered twenty children, Arnauld became a theologian, logician and philosopher. He collaborated with both Nicole and Pascal, on their famous The Art of Thinking, which later became known as ‘the Port Royal Logic’ or sometimes just ‘The Logic’. He is also remembered as the author of several of the replies to Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, gaining in the process a reputation as an intellectually rigourous and perceptive critic, and bringing attention to the problem now known as ‘the Cartesian circle’. Like Descartes, Arnauld is a firm rationalist. In The Art of Thinking, he proclaims that the main aim of logic is to inculcate clear thinking. Thus he writes, ‘nothing is more to be esteemed than aptness in discerning the true from the false. Other qualities of mind are of limited use, but precision of thought is essential to every aspect and walk of life. To distinguish truth from error is difficult not only in the sciences but also in the everyday affairs men engage in and discuss. Men are everywhere confronted with alternative routes – some true and others false – and reason must choose between them. Who chooses well has a sound mind, who chooses ill a defective one. Capacity for discerning the truth is the most important measure of minds.’ . The Art of Thinking consists of four parts corresponding to the principal operations of the mind: conceiving, judging, reasoning and ordering. Conceiving and judging imply a knowledge of language, since it is concepts and propositions, essentially linguistic items, that are conceived and judged. Reasoning is a higherlevel function of conceiving and judging, required when the concepts that form a proposition are not sufficiently clear for a judgement to be made. Finally, ordering is a mental activity which reflects the method of the new inductive sciences. . Arnauld accepts the general tenets of Cartesian thought. In line with Descartes’ ontological dualism, Arnauld commits himself to the idea that speech is part of the material world and bound by its laws, but thought, belonging to the essence of the mind, is not so constricted. This leads to a distinction in Arnauld’s work between grammar on the one hand, which belongs to speech; and logic, which belongs to the realm of thought. In the four-fold classification of the Logic, Arnauld places logic itself firmly within the faculty of reason, but insists that reasoning is merely an extension of judging. . This idea is important for it reflects one side of a foundational debate concerning the status of logic. Is logic, as Arnauld would have it, merely a tool of clear thinking in order to aid rhetoric, or does it reflect universal laws of thought that correspond to reality? This latter view, to which Arnauld and the Port Royal logicians were hostile, holds that there are three laws of thought that are necessary principles for any rational creature, even God. These are the law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, and the law of the excluded middle. These state respectively that a proposition cannot be simultaneously asserted and denied; that if A is identical to B, then anything that is true of A is also true of B; and that every proposition is determinately either true or false. Modern developments in both logic and physics (quantum physics) have cast doubt on the universality of at least two of these so-called laws, giving support to the Port Royals’ contention that logic is merely the refinement of clear thinking in aid of argumentation, or rhetoric..
阿尔诺出身于一个律师家庭，他是父亲的20个子女中最小的儿子。阿尔诺后来成为神学家、逻辑学家和哲学家。他与Pierre Nicole、帕斯卡一同编写了《思维的艺术》一书，即后来人们所熟知的《波尔·罗亚尔逻辑》或《逻辑》。另外，他还因为对笛卡尔的《第一哲学沉思》进行回应而为人们所知。在回应笛卡尔的过程中，他被人们评价为“思维严谨而敏锐的批评家”，他还发现了现在我们成为“笛卡尔循环”的问题。
和笛卡尔一样，阿尔诺也是一个坚定的唯理论者。他在《思维的艺术》中宣称，逻辑最重要的目的在于让人获得清晰的思维。所以，他写道：“没有什么比辨别真伪的能力更重要了。心灵的其他特性往往作用有限，但是思维的精确性则对于生活的任何一个方面都是必不可少的。无论是科学活动，还是日常事务，要做到辨别真伪、去伪存真都是不容易的。人们无时无刻不面临着选择——这其中有好坏对错的区别，人们必须通过理智去做出选择。做出明智选择的，心智往往更健全；选择不当的，则心智难免有缺陷。衡量心智最重要的标准，莫过于辨别真伪的能力。”
《思维的艺术》包含了运用思维的四个基本方法：理解、判断、推理和组织整理（综合）。理解和判断包含了语言的知识，因为人们理解、判断的对象是由语言表达的概念、名个体。推理则是比理解和判断更为高级的能力，当组成命题的概念不足以让人做出明确的判断时就需要它。最后，组织整理（综合）则是一种反映了新归纳科学的心理活动。
阿尔诺接受笛卡尔的基本主张。根据笛卡尔形的实体二元论，阿诺尔也同意言语属于物质世界，因而受物理定律的规定；但是思想则属于心灵的本质，并不受物理定律控制。阿尔诺由此做出了语法和逻辑的区分，语法是属于言语的，而逻辑则属于思想的范畴。《逻辑》中介绍的四种方法里面，阿尔诺将逻辑归属到推理能力之中，但是却认为推理只不过是判断的延伸。
这种观点十分重要，因为它反映了关于逻辑的地位的争论中很重要的一面。逻辑仅仅像阿尔诺所说的那样，只不过是为了修辞，清晰思维所使用的一个工具吗？逻辑是否也体现了反映现实的思想所遵从的普遍规律？阿尔诺和波尔·罗亚尔的逻辑学家都十分反对后面这种观点，他们认为包括上帝在内的所有理性存在着都必须遵从三个思维定律，即不矛盾律、同一律和排中律。它们分别是说：不能同时既肯定又否定一个说法；如果A就是B，那么B一定具有A的所有性质；任何一个命题要么真，要么假。逻辑学和物理学（量子物理）发展到现在，对其中至少两个所谓的定律提出了质疑，这也支持了波尔·罗亚尔学者们的观点——逻辑只不过是为了论辩或修辞的需要，对思维所作的改进。
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