Investigate the purpose of Bacon’s philosophy and the way in which it has been received since
Investigate the purpose of Bacon's philosophy and the way in which it has been received since
Long ago, Bacon asserted that science must begin with doubts in order to end in certainties, a paradox that stills leads to misunderstandings about Bacon and about science. It is the presumption of error and fallibility on which science is based. This paradox was first put forth by Francis Bacon in The New Organon (1620), building on his previous Advancement of Learning (1605). He announced that great things were possible in science, provided that nearly all the old methods and beliefs were cast away. What struck him was the mixture of unproductive dogma and unresolved controversy over basic theory in science despite long centuries of data-collecting and thought. He had ideas about a remedy, yet he believed no remedy could be complete because the human mind itself had faults and limitations that made it almost incapable of seeing truly.
The seventeenth century is seen as a golden age of science. Yet when Bacon considered the matter, scientific inquiry was prolific but not very fruitful. Cosmology was unspecific, the old Scholastic system of four elements offered no definite path to new discoveries, alchemists were at odds about basic laws of chemistry, and when an innovator such as William Gilbert (1540-1603) did achieve knowledge about magnetism, he then went overboard with mystical extensions of his discoveries. Whether stressing reason and logic, symbolic connections and intuition, or hands-on experiment, the active disciplines had yielded few outcomes solid enough to be built upon.
But there was practical progress in navigation, engineering, and astronomy. Empiricism was not lacking, but it did not underlie broad scientific theories. These tended to soar aloft, in obedience to what Bacon called 'Idols of the mind' because they diverted men from examining divinely created nature. What was needed was 'a closer and purer league between ... the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made)' (Bacon 1960, 95).
Bacon saw that good thinking as a paradox. The mind is effective, not only in feeling and imagining, but even in reasoning. Fastening on one idea, it traces implications, follows up parallels, leaps to conclusions, and creates a tight and persuasive system of beliefs. This power can be useful, if properly disciplined, but it tends to shrug aside direct observation of nature. Man, according to Bacon, does not have a privileged intuition into the construction of the cosmos -a direct link to the Creator's intentions -as many then believed. He must let the actions of nature in the uncontrollable future be the arbiters of his theory's soundness. Initial speculations must issue in a well-formulated experiment, and that, in turn, must yield to a sensory judgment of the experiment's result.
Bacon called endemic human limitations "Idols of the Tribe." Even the cleverest minds leap to generalizations, notice striking events more than typical ones, and seek out supportive data more than counterexamples. They fasten on apparent patterns too quickly.
'Idols of the Cave' were the individual's limitations and enthusiasms. He may apply favorite ideas or remedies to every-thing. 'Idols of the Marketplace' were the limitations of common language, suitable for everyday life, but not to describe nature accurately. 'Substance,' 'heavy,' 'moist,' and 'dense' were all vague terms. New words must refer to measurable physical phenomena (1960, 41-60). In developing these ideas, Bacon outlined a critique that threatened scientific thinking.
'When the human mind has once despaired of finding truth, its interest in all things grows fainter, and the result is that men turn aside to pleasant ...
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'Idols of the Cave' were the individual's limitations and enthusiasms. He may apply favorite ideas or remedies to every-thing. 'Idols of the Marketplace' were the limitations of common language, suitable for everyday life, but not to describe nature accurately. 'Substance,' 'heavy,' 'moist,' and 'dense' were all vague terms. New words must refer to measurable physical phenomena (1960, 41-60). In developing these ideas, Bacon outlined a critique that threatened scientific thinking.
'When the human mind has once despaired of finding truth, its interest in all things grows fainter, and the result is that men turn aside to pleasant disputatious and discourses and roam as it were from object to object ... a wandering kind of inquiry that leads to nothing'. (Bacon, 1874, III, 364; 1960, 88, 67.)
But he rejected the immobile skepticism, common at that time, which doubted whether any human theory about nature would ever be a clear advance. Some raise doubts, he said without any aim of settling a question. They may embrace a 'deliberate and factitious despair' of learning anything new, for the sake of thinking their own thought perfect.
Just as analyzing government mismanagement should actually give hope (Bacon wistfully reflected) because it shows the failure was not inevitable, so he will offer 'arguments of hope,' by analyzing the bad habits of mind and futile methods so far used in science (1960, 94). Both mind and senses are unreliable, yet the right method of using mind to correct mind, as we look from a different angle to correct sight, might repair our faults just enough to achieve reliable theories.
Unlike most revolutionaries Bacon offers not a cure, but 'helps': checks and balances (1960, 37). First is the thinker's deliberate attention to each pitfall. Second, his limits will be bypassed by involving diverse inquirers. And finally, the theory-making urge itself must be challenged by experimental tests of each assumption and conclusion. The inquirer's thinking will also be affected. What counts as a theory or a scientific term will be guided by his awareness that an eventual empirical test is in the offing. And, conversely, dubious scientific thought is influenced by the knowledge that no rigorous test will be applied.
Bacon's paradoxical message that the mind is faulty, though the mind can also achieve wonders is usually misunderstood, ignored, or quoted misleadingly. For Bacon grasped that scientific method must be intimately linked with a critique of science, and that such a critique was not to be just a start-up routine for modern science, but would be of continuing, even increasing, importance. The more that inquiry prospered, the more its intellectual, semantic, and institutional offshoots would be vulnerable to the Idols of the mind.
Bacon saw that the three Idols might generate whole systems of belief, tightly interwoven, fiercely defended, securely institutionalized, and thus hard to dislodge. His fourth category, 'Idols of the Theatre,' referring to the 'vain show' of such a system, incorporates all the others. Though familiar mainly with the Scholastic system, he expected that as freer thought was permitted, many new, specious systems would arise (1960, 61-66, 44). The fame of his initiating role for modern science has obscured his concern with the perennial.
Bacon did not envisage the mathematical physics to come, thus he thought more generally about the search for meaningful patterns in the confusion of phenomena, making his ideas particularly relevant to fledgling and would-be sciences. He hoped that ethics and politics would also yield to his ideas: But the notion of creating a science of society tends to make people aim for universal laws, exact measurements and the prestige of a system. Soon after Bacon's death, Thomas Hobbes attempted such a science, with simple mechanical principles in the style of physics. But such efforts ought to be 'scientific' first in heeding Bacon's warnings about straying from the facts and clinging to assumptions or terminology that cannot lead to new, testable insight. Bacon would have one spend more time with tentative 'middle principles.' Bacons reluctance to assume uniformity is pertinent in studying human nature.
Bacon's list of features in Scholasticism that held back inquiry is surprisingly up-to-date. For example, he includes worship of antiquity; worship of the new; picking on points for argument rather than new discovery; didactic presentation of what is not yet understood; premature formalizing of dubious beliefs; reverence toward an oft-quoted founder; and eloquent elaboration of trivial ideas (1874, III, 289-295).
What Bacon called 'contentious' learning originated in the twelfth century as a laudable attempt to consider more than one view. But the formal debate had become a mere contest in which dismissing an opponent took precedence over gaining new insight. Bacon's value is in pressing us to question the systems or rhetorical habits of many modern philosophers. Posing questions of pertinent concreteness is, to be sure, a central intellectual skill. Mastering it may require a long struggle with one or more slippery systems finally abandoned.
Bacon's ideas were both heeded and ignored in the centuries following. His insistence that theory be in continual interchange with experiment is fundamental to science and was assumed by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Yet the rise of mathematical physics, which seemed to contain its own safeguards against error, encouraged renewed trust in reason alone.
In the 1660s, promoters of experimental methods in England hoped that direct study of nature would offer a refuge from the theological wrangling and ensuing violence of the Civil War. Bacon's talk of enchanted mirrors and idolatries of mind had an almost Calvinist ring to those eager to link religion with the clear light of reason. Even Robert Boyle, who was closest to Bacon in his methods, intentions, and interests, wanted science and religion mutually to vindicate one another in 'natural theology.' But Bacon regarded scientific assumptions derived from religion as 'anticipations of nature' which had always prevented sound discoveries. Specifically, he rejected attempts to use the book of Genesis as an authority for science (1960, 65).
But in the heyday of natural theology (the eighteenth century), this was forgotten, and it was possible for a geologist to think he was heeding Bacon just because he looked at physical evidence, though his purpose was to vindicate the account in Genesis. Bacon's wished-for method of constantly questioning and retesting one's thought, going from works to axioms and back, as he put it, could hardly be more difficult (1960, 117).
In fact, Bacon feared that people would judge his ideas wholly by his tentative suggestions for moving from data to low-level hypotheses. And that is exactly what has happened. These proposals are usually cited as the Baconian method, then dismissed as inadequate. Bacon himself said that his positive proposals should be thrown out if they didn't serve. What mattered was the empirical testing of each theory's assumptions and conclusions, neither accepting old dogmas nor hurriedly forming new ones. For 'the art of discovery' would also improve as science advanced.
The point being that Bacon's 'method' is really a set of principles underlying method. He assumed that native wit would generate theories and that the real problem was to discipline them (1960, 130).
But the false 'Baconianism' is not the only problem affecting Bacon's meaning. A common misconception is that he wanted science to aim at power instead of truth. He is associated with the modern slogan 'knowledge is power'. Usually, people mean by it that knowledge will bring us worldly triumph. Or, at best, that knowledge brings power to humanity in the form of useful technology. Bacon did want to achieve the latter eventually. But he was referring to the proof of scientific theories in saying:
'Knowledge and power meet in one; for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.' (1960, 3)
That is, only by making nature act a certain way (exercising 'power') can you be sure that you understand how it does act, and only by knowing that can you control it.
This simple idea is far-reaching in implication. It reflects an appreciation of how people usually do behave: they talk wildly, far from any facts. In Bacon's famous triad, they produce 'fantastical,' 'contentious,' or 'delicate' learning; statements that are false, rhetorically persuasive only, or merely aesthetic wordplay (1874, III, 282).
Bacon's hope of eventual technology is regularly confused with his methodological concern with experiment (power) to verify knowledge. He didn't want people to stop at quick practical gains. To shrink from intellectual challenge was as cowardly as to fear testing one's suppositions against reality. 'Works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life.' Yet he did believe that to ease human misery was a noble purpose. Most people, he said, seek knowledge for professional advancement, profit, or to triumph over rivals; sometimes for idle curiosity. The benefit of one's country was a higher end, and better than all these, the good of mankind (1960, 70, 124, 129; 1874, 294-95).
In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon explained that by 'use' he didn't mean achieving wealth or success, but what would be 'solid and fruitful' as opposed to 'vain and fantastical.' If it is real knowledge, it has implications; it leads on, and makes one want to experiment further. The hypothetical path to concrete reality should be intelligible, however complex. Sometimes people embrace dense ideologies of politics or psychoanalysis while avoiding the question of how it will help even though their stated purpose is social reform or healing.
Bacon saw clearly the dichotomy between the shifty language of men and nature's power, which could not be bought off by flattery or incantation. 'To overcome not an adversary in argument, but nature in action' was his aim and the most important distinction he made (1960, pref., 36). He knew he was surrounded by adroit rhetoricians who refused to accept that words sometimes succeed and sometimes fall to get close to the things they purport to describe, and that it matters. The idea that thought can never be anything but rhetoric or 'conversation' will only satisfy those who never feel obliged to act, and therefore to get reality right.
The mingled promise and disarray of natural philosophy in his time led Bacon to appreciate two great freedoms of the mind. We can question whole systems that seem to violate evidence or logic. It does not matter how many people swear by such beliefs, or for how many centuries they have done so, or with what coercive power. But we can do better than reject the affirmations of the populous. We can thread our own path through the forests of unsorted experience, trusting our minds not to guess right, but to devise tests for detecting falseness. Bacon did neither revolutionize science nor make any grand discoveries. He was not, like Aristotle, 'the master of them that know.' But he encourages those who think, and for that reason, his writings have blossomed through the centuries and should not be ignored.
References
Bacon, Francis. 1960. The New Organon. Ed. by Fulton H. Anderson. New York: Macmillan. (Reprint of translation of Novum Organum in Bacon 1874 below.)
857-74. The Works of Francis Bacon (14 vols.). Ed. by J. Spedding, D.D. Heath, and R.L. Ellis. London: Longman.
Peltonen, Markku (ed.). 1996. The Cambridge Companion to Bacon. New York: Cambridge University Press.
