西方历史学经典名著选读读书笔记

Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas

Historians of ideas focus on two types of meaning – literal and intended meaning. Quentin Skinner makes two key distinctions: between literal and intended meaning, and between text and contexts. These distinctions should be considere considered separately. A statement’s intended meaning may differ from its literal meaning –‘the sense and reference of the terms used to express it. Skinner’s first example is irony. Taken literally, Defoe’s The Shortest-Way With the Dissenters argues that dissenters should be executed. Taken ironically, as Defoe actually intended, the argument is for toleration, not persecution. To conclude that Defoe meant to defend persecution would be to confuse literal and intended meanings, to confuse what the words say and what Defoe meant by them. Irony is the ‘textbook case’ of ‘a divergence between what a person says and what she means’.

Skinner’s second example is ambiguity. We should look to intended meanings when literal meanings are unclear –when ‘the speaker fails to make clear how exactly the utterance is to be taken or understood’. Ambiguity is ‘rampant’ in natural languages, and perhaps no statement is ever entirely unambiguous. Much more could be said about speech-act theory. The basic point is that intended and literal meanings diverge, and we usually prioritise intended meanings. This

view is standard for philosophers of language, although they differ from each other in many details. Of course, my brief account cannot fully justify this position. But three points are briefly worth emphasising.

The value of textual analysis should be briefly highlighted. We do not need contextual analysis to reject obvious misreadings, like Geoffrey Hill’s bizarre claim that Hobbes believed in i ntrinsic value. Indeed, the Cambridge school’s huge contribution to intellectual history partly reflects high-quality textual analysis. Reading a text carefully is necessary – but not sufficient. Ultimately, the combination of textual and contextual analys is is crucial, as in Skinner’s superlative analysis of Hobbes’s changing account of liberty.

In summary, for many intellectual historians the aim is to uncover intended meanings, and the means to that end are textual and/or contextual analysis, both of which may involve analysing literal meaning.

斯金纳

斯金纳是行为主义学派最负盛名的代表人物——被称为“彻底的行为主义者”。也是世界心理学史上最为著名的心理学家之一.

在哈佛大学攻读心理学硕士的时候，他受到了行为主义心理学的吸引，成为了一名彻头彻尾的行为主义者，从此开始了他一生的心理学家生涯。他在华生等人的基础上向前迈进了一大步，提出了有别于巴甫洛夫的条件反射的另一种条件反射行为，并将二者做了区分，在此基础上提出了自己的行为主义理论——操作性条件反射理论。他长期致力于研究鸽子和老鼠的操作性条件反射行为，提出了“及时强化”的概念以及强化的时间规律，形成了自己的一套理论。斯金纳还将操作性条件反射理论应用于对人的研究，他认为，人是没有尊严和自由的，人们作出某种行为，不做出某种行为，只取决于一个影响因素，那就是行为的后果。人并不能自由选择自己的行为，而是根据奖惩来决定自己以何种方式行动，因此，