Any great discovery of a new law is useful only if we can take more out than we put in. Now, Newton used the second and third of Kepler’s laws to deduce his law of gravitation. What did he predict? First, his analysis of the moon’s motion was a prediction because it connected the falling of objects on the earth’s surface with that of the moon. Second, the question is, is the orbit an ellipse? We shall see in a later chapter how it is possible to calculate the motion exactly, and indeed one can prove that it should be an ellipse, so no extra fact is needed to explain Kepler’s first law. Thus Newton made his first powerful prediction.
How does the chemist find what the arrangement is? He mixes bottles full of stuff together, and if it turns red, it tells him that it consists of one hydrogen and two carbons tied on here; if it turns blue, on the other hand, that is not the way it is at all. This is one of the most fantastic pieces of detective work that has ever been done—organic chemistry. To discover the arrangement of the atoms in these enormously complicated arrays the chemist looks at what happens when he mixes two different substances together. The physicist could never quite believe that the chemist knew what he was talking about when he described the arrangement of the atoms. For about twenty years it has been possible, in some cases, to look at such molecules (not quite as complicated as this one, but some which contain parts of it) by a physical method, and it has been possible to locate every atom, not by looking at colors, but by measuring where they are. And lo and behold!, the chemists are almost always correct.
John Corvino,美国韦恩州立大学哲学系副教授,有同性恋道德学家(the gay moralist)之称。2008 年他曾做过一个题为「同性恋在道德上有什么错?」(What’s morally wrong with homosexuality?)的演讲 [1]。演讲中谈到多年前有位天主教神父对他来校演讲非常不安,于是给校报写了一封长信,其中一段说:
Of course homosexuality is bad for society. If everyone were homosexual, there would be no society. 同性恋当然是危害社会的。要是每个人都是同性恋,那就没有社会了。
而 Corvino 的回信则写道:
Dear Father priest, if everyone were Roman Catholic priest, there would be no society either. 亲爱的神父,要是每个人都是罗马天主教神父,同样没有社会。
提问者问的是这样的推理有没有道理,这样的推理指的是去掉「同性恋」这个具体内容之后的单纯的逻辑形式,即「假设每个人都 X,人类就会灭绝,所以 X 不好」。而要指出这个逻辑形式是错误的,仅仅需要举出一个反例即可。男人就是这样一个明确的反例,补充内容一中说的神父也是反例,这些反例里的任何一个都可以说明上面那个推理、那个逻辑论证的形式是错误的。指出这个论证形式是错的,根本不需要涉及同性恋问题的道德讨论。
换句话说,如果你想从逻辑上推理出同性恋是错的,那你必须用一个保真的、有效的逻辑推理形式,而这样的论证形式(假设每个人都 X,人类就会灭绝,所以 X 不好)是不保真的、无效的,所以这个推理没有道理。