【这个词条的翻译花了可能不止24个小时。用这种方式迎接2025年元旦，值得！】
奎因哲学词条：信念
（奎因《短文集：一本不拘泥于分类学标准的哲学词典》，译者：翟玉章）
【相信并不是一种活动，而是一种行为倾向，即在适当的情况下以某种方式做出反应的倾向。信念不是招之即来挥之即去的东西，而是证据（真实的或幻想的）的结果。一种检验一个人是否持有某个信念的有效方法，是让他把钱押在该信念上，只要该信念的真假的决定能使打赌双方满意。理性人悖论：理性人既相信他的每一个信念都是真的，也相信他的有些信念是假的。】
本文提到的词条：信念
Belief
信念
To believe is to think, in one very limited sense of the latter versatile verb. To believe that beauty is truth is to think that beauty is truth. To believe so is to think so. The two verbs are thus interchangeable before that and so, but they diverge elsewhere. We can think hard, but we cannot believe hard. We can believe something, but we cannot think something. Grammar forbids.
在英语中，多义动词“think”有时可以用作“believe”。To believe that beauty is truth（相信美就是真)，就是to think that beauty is truth（认为美就是真）。To believe so（相信如此）就是to think so（认为如此）。在后接“that”和“so”时，这两个词是可以相互替换的，在其他语境中则不能相互替换。我们可以使劲地think（想），但我们不能使劲地believe（相信）。我们可以believe something（相信某事），但我们不能think something（想某事），因为“think”是个语法上的不及物动词。
Believing is a disposition. Thinking, apart from the contexts that and so, is an activity, however sedentary. We could tire ourselves out thinking, if we put our minds to it, but believing [19]takes no toll. We sit and think, but do we sit and believe? The White Queen, indeed, professed to do so: "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. " But it will be agreed that the White Queen was atypical.
Believing（相信）是一种倾向。而在不后接“that”或“so”的语境中，thinking（想）却是一种活动，尽管它并不涉及身体的运动。我们也许会疲劳不堪，如果我们全神贯注地想的话。但相信却不费吹灰之力。我们可以坐下来想，但我们会坐下来相信吗？白王后声称她就是这样做的：“我像你这么大年纪的时候，每天都要练上半个钟头。有时我会在早餐前就已相信了六个之多的不可能的事情。”但大家都认为，白王后并没有典型性。
She represented beliefs, some of them anyway, as voluntary activities rather than dispositions. She was wrong about their being activities; they are dispositions. But we may still ask whether they are ever voluntary, for some dispositions are. We are voluntarily acquiring a disposition, or trying to, when we memorize "II Penseroso" or the multiplication table or make a New Year's resolution. Belief, however, is not that kind of a disposition. To speak of simply deciding to believe something, independently of any evidence real or imagined, is to stretch the term 'belief' beyond belief.
她把信念（至少其中的一些）描述为主动的活动而非倾向。这是错的，因为信念是倾向而不是活动。但我们仍可以问：信念可以是主动的倾向吗？有些倾向确实是主动的。当我们背诵诗歌“忧郁的人”（Il Penseroso）或乘法表，或制定新年计划时，我们就是在主动地或努力地获得一种倾向。不过，信念并不属于这类倾向。有人谈起信念时，仿佛它们可以招之即来、挥之即去，一切都取决于我们当下的决定，而根本用不着考虑（真实或想像的）证据；我只能说，他们所说的所谓信念已越出了“信念”这个词的外延了。
An enamored（迷恋的） young man has his reasons for subscribing to the tenets of his fiancee's church, and a heretic（异教徒） threatened by the Inquisition（宗教裁判所） had his reasons for a similar move; but these are cases of feigning（假装） belief, of paying lip or pen service, and not of believing. Pascal's notorious wager1, on the other hand, and Tertullian's credo quia impossibile est, and William James's Will to Believe, strike me as strange distortions of the notion of belief. Hoping or wishing can conduce to believing, but only by seducing the subject into overestimating his fancied evidence.
一个热恋中的年轻男子有理由接受他未婚妻所在教会的教义，一个受到宗教裁判所威胁的异教徒也有理由采取类似的行动；但这些都是假装相信，都是口头或笔头上的敷衍，而不是真的相信。另一方面，臭名昭著的帕斯卡尔赌、特土良的“我相信它，因为它是荒谬的”（credo quia impossibile est），以及威廉·詹姆斯的《信仰意志》2，在我看来，是对信念这一概念的奇怪扭曲。希望或愿望可以导致信念，但仍需通过诱使受试者对它所幻想的证据做过高的估计才能做到。
Now that we have agreed that a belief is a disposition, as I trust we have, it is time we went on to consider what it is that the believer is disposed to do. One who believes that beauty is truth, or that his Redeemer liveth, is disposed presumably to respond in the affirmative when asked whether beauty is truth or whether his Redeemer liveth; but lip service, again, is subject to discount. Actions, behaviorism teaches, speak louder than words.
既然相信是一种倾向，那么相信者会倾向于做什么呢？一个相信美就是真（或他的救赎主活着）的人，当被问及美是否就是真3（或他的救赎主是否活着4）时，他会倾向于给出肯定的回答；但让我们再次指出，言语上的敷衍是不能算数的。行为主义教导我们，行动胜于言辞。
One way of testing belief, powerful where applicable, is by calling upon the professed believer to put his money where his mouth is. Acceptance of a wager evinces sincerity, and the odds [20]accepted conveniently measure the strength of the belief. But this method is applicable only in cases where the believed proposition is one that can eventually be decided to the satisfaction of both parties, so that the bet can be settled. It is not applicable to the one about beauty, or about one's Redeemer. One wonders whether Keats really believed that one about beauty or whether he was merely bent on creating a bit of beauty on his own, like Christian Morgenstern's weasel（鼬yòu，黄鼠狼） who sat on a Kiesel in a Bachgerieselonly for the sake of the rhyme. Or Poe's Lenore, Yaanek, and Guy De Vere. Or Al Smith's Mamie O'Rourke. There are those who would commit mayhem -- not murder, perhaps, but mayhem -- for the sake of a rhyme. I recall a line from a song: "Fair Naples sleeping, a vigil keeping. " Cognitive content to the winds.
一种检验一个人是否持有某个信念的方法，是让他把钱押在该信念上。如果他愿意打赌，就表明他真的持有该信念。而他对该信念的强度，则可以很方便地用他愿意接受的赔率大小来衡量。这种方法很有效，但只适用于这样的场合：被赌博的观点的真假能得到令双方满意的解决，否则他们便无法决出胜负。这种方法并不适用于上面关于美或关于某人的救赎者的观点。也许，济慈并不是真的相信那个关于美的观点，他只是想自己创造一些美，就像克里斯蒂安·莫根斯特恩笔下的黄鼠狼，为了押韵而坐在溪流中的卵石上5。同样地，爱伦坡笔下的莱诺尔、雅尼克和盖伊·德·维尔6。阿尔·史密斯的玛米·奥罗克7。一些人会为了押韵而陷入混乱；注意不是谋杀，而是混乱。我想起一首歌中的一句歌词：“美丽的那不勒斯在沉睡，彻夜不眠”8。确实押韵，但却没有认识内容9。
A belief, in the best and clearest case, is a bundle of dispositions. It may include a disposition to lip service, a disposition to accept a wager, and various dispositions to take precautions, or to book passage, or to tidy up the front room, or the like, depending on what particular belief it may be. It is remarkable that we can apply this single familiar noun or verb effortlessly to such a heterogeneous domain; for, apart from the lip service and perhaps the wager, the dispositions that constitute one belief differ extravagantly from the dispositions that constitute another.
在最理想和最清楚的情况下，一个信念就是一系列倾向，其中可能包括口头表态、接受打赌、采取预防措施、预订行程、整理前厅等等倾向，具体取决于是哪一个信念。除了言语上的表态和接受打赌外，不同信念的组成倾向是迥然不同的；令人惊叹的是，我们可以将同一个熟悉的名词或动词，毫不费力地用于如此五花八门的领域！
Beliefs do sometimes make good behavioral sense without admitting of wagers. This is true of very theoretical beliefs, having to do, say, with the expanding universe or elementary particles or the dawn of language. The turn that one gives to one's research, and the supporting evidence that one marshals or the corollaries that one derives, are substantial indications that one holds the belief, though it be a belief on which a bet could never be settled.
有些信念虽然无法接受打赌，但仍然有不错的行为意义。理论性很强的信念，如关于宇宙膨胀、基本粒子和语言起源方面的信念，就是如此。一个人从事什么样的研究，收集什么样的支持性证据，又做出了什么样的推论，都是他持有某个信念的重要迹象，尽管围绕这个信念的赌局是决不出胜负的。
But beliefs grade off, as my first two examples illustrate, to where their dispositional content apart from lip service becomes tenuous to the vanishing point. What shared trait can have grouped all these extravagantly diverse states of mind, real or professed, under a single serviceable term, belief? None, I [21]submit. They are grouped rather by a linguistic quirk, the adapter that, which can be prefixed thoughtlessly to any and every declarative sentence to produce a grammatically impeccable and hence presumably meaningful direct object for the verb believes. The many useful and behaviorally significant sentences of the form 'x believes that p' seduce us into supposing that the rest of the sentences of that form make sense too. Sense dwindles from case to case, and we are at a loss to draw a line.
正如我一开始的两个例子10所表明的那样，信念的倾向性内容（言语倾向除外）会变得稀薄，直至消失。所有这些千差万别的心灵状态（无论是真实的还是宣称的）都被归类为信念，莫非它们之间有什么共同的特征吗？我认为没有。它们之所以被这样归类，原因毋宁是语言学上的。任何陈述句都可以毫无障碍地由“that”引导，而成为“相信”一词的宾语；宾语从句在语法上无可挑剔，因此人们不假思索地认为它们的意义也没得说。我们见过许多有用且具有行为意义的形如“x 相信 p”的语句，这诱使我们认为这种形式的其他语句也同样是有意义的。然而，意义性是逐渐减弱的，泾渭分明的界线是不存在的。
Loath though one is to kick a concept when it is down, it would be wasteful to pass over a curious and well-known paradox in which the concept of belief is enmeshed. To believe something is to believe that it is true; therefore a reasonable person believes each of his beliefs to be true; yet experience has taught him to expect that some of his beliefs, he knows not which, will turn out to be false. A reasonable person believes, in short, that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false. I, for one, had expected better of reasonable persons.
我已发表了一些对信念这个概念的微词，本已不想再为已甚了。但如果略过这个概念缠绕其中的悖论，我会感到遗憾的。相信某件事就是相信它是真的；所以理性的人相信自己的每一个信念都是真的。然而，经验已经教会他去期待：他的一些信念（他不知道具体是哪些）最终会被证明是假的。简而言之，一个理性的人既相信自己的每个信念都是真的，也相信其中的一些是假的11，我作为理性人中的一员，对理性人原本是有更高的期望的。
[1]这是帕斯卡（1623—1662）提出的一个关于人应该相信上帝存在的论证：如果上帝不存在，我们仍可以信仰他而不受惩罚；如果上帝真的存在，我们怀疑他便危险了；所以谨慎起见，还是应该信仰上帝。——译者
[2]这本书的开篇是它的同名讲稿（1896），其中主张，相信缺乏证据的观点（特别是宗教方面的观点）在某些情况下是合乎理性的。——译者
[3]出自济慈（1795——1821，英国人）的诗 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”（“希腊古瓮颂”）：Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all（美就是真，真就是美，这就是全部）。——译者
[4]出自《圣经旧约》：我知道我的救赎主活着，末了必站在地上。（约伯记19：25）——译者
[5]出自克里斯蒂安·莫根斯特恩（1871——1914，德国人）的诗“Das ästhetische Wiesel”（“爱美的黄鼠狼”）：Ein Wiesel/ saß auf einem Kiesel/ inmitten Bachgeriesel（一只黄鼠狼/坐在卵石上/在溪流中间）。“黄鼠狼”（Wiesel）、“卵石”（Kiesel）和“溪流”（Bachgeriesel）这三个词在德语里是押韵的。——译者
[6]莱诺尔和盖伊·德·维尔出自爱伦坡的诗“Lenore”（“莱诺尔”），他们是一对情侣。雅尼克出自爱伦坡的诗“Ulalume”（“尤娜路姆”），是一个虚构的火山。——译者
[7]阿尔·史密斯（1873——1944）是1928年美国总统大选中的民主党候选人。他选用当时的流行歌曲《纽约的人行道》作为他参加竞选的主题曲。玛米·奥罗克就出自这首歌中的歌词：男孩和女孩在一起/我和玛米·奥罗克。——译者
[8]出自哈里·戴维·克尔（1880——1957，美国人）作词的歌曲“Neapolitan Nights”（“那不勒斯之夜”）。这句歌词的英语原文是：Fair Naples sleeping, a vigil keeping。——译者
[9]我想起《世说新语》上的故事。晋明帝还是个孩子时，曾对长安和太阳哪个距离南京近这一问题有过两次矛盾的回答。一次他说长安近，因为只听说有人从长安来，但从没听说过有人从太阳来。另一次他说太阳近，因为我们抬头就能看到太阳，但却不可能看到长安。他的回答很敏捷，也很有趣，但它们合在一起同样也没有认识内容。——译者
[10]即“美就是真”和“他的救赎主活着”这两个信念。——译者
[11]我把这个悖论暂时称为理性人悖论。它和所谓的序言悖论实质上是一样的：对于理性人来说，他们书中的每一个语句都是真的，但至少有一个语句是假的。——译者
