Philo of Science

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

In complete contrast to Descartes's skepticism, Bacon trusted the senses completely. Observation was everything, it revealed the truth, and no supernatural guarantees were needed. Nature, for Bacon, was "an open book" that could not possibly be misread by an unprejudiced mind. As Leonardo da Vinci had said a century before: "Experience never errs." Bacon would have found absurd Descartes's conclusion that the knowledge acquired by the senses of an atheist was somehow less reliable than that acquired by a believer. The suggestion that the Devil might deliberately be deceiving us has no place in Bacon's scheme of things. He was a straightforward, no-nonsense thinker, although there are those who would rephrase this description to read "a naive, unsophisticated dilettante."

HMS (l’homme moyen sensuel: roughly, “average man”) in general believes what he sees, and scientists generally put their faith in experiment. For this we have to thank Bacon, a few Greeks and Romans, and a succession of European thinkers, mostly living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of them in an intellectual atmosphere that modern man has recreated only in twentieth-century dictatorships. The dominance of dogma in Bacon's day, and in the previous few hundred years, was almost absolute. Most scholars in fourteenth-century Oxford accepted almost anything written by Aristotle or the fathers of the Church, whether or not it was confirmed by their senses. At the trial of Galileo the defendant found that the evidence of his eyes, as aided by his telescope, was confronted not by conflicting observations but by centuries-old dogma. For his inquisitors, Holy Writ was the final arbiter. Galileo claimed to have observed four previously undetected moons of Jupiter. The Church ruled that they could not exist. Francesco Sizi, an almost forgotten contemporary of Galileo, explained why. There were only seven heavenly bodies (seven has a strong place in mystic lore), and each had an astrological significance. The proposed moons had no astrological significance, therefore they could not influence man, therefore they could not exist. Cesare Cremonini, an Aristotelian colleague of Galileo at Padua, refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Why would anyone want to see what no one but Galileo had seen? "And anyway, peering through those spectacles gives me a headache." The professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano declared that if he were allowed to first build the supposed four satellites of Jupiter into some glasses, then he too would see what Galileo saw. Bacon would have asked to look through the telescope, and if what he saw clashed with the tenets of the Church or the ancients, then too bad for them. His single-minded insistence on the primacy of observation was no less a rejection of authority than Descartes's. He believed what he saw, not what he read.

Bacon was not a practicing scientist, but he affirmed that knowledge could only be built on the observation of nature. In parallel with this "commonsense" view of nature, he saw the purpose of science as "the relief of man's estate," the betterment of our material environment and health-antibiotics rather than relativity. This concept of the role of science was to profoundly influence the seventeenth-century attitude toward science in England and the philosophy of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France.

The trouble with Bacon was that he distrusted theory. We agree with his belief that the basis of science is observation, but fact gathering is not enough. Without theory, science is merely picking up shells on the beach. Science is not a Baconian flea market of unrelated data, but Bacon, with English down-to-earthness, was suspicious of hypothesizing intellectuals: "The intellect, left to itself, ought always to be suspected." And again: "For the wit and mind of Man ... if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance and profit." Like Descartes's vortices. Bacon was particularly contemptuous of Greek philosophy, which he considered to be "puerile, or rather talkative than generative ... fruitful in controversies, but barren in effect."1 Bacon's allergy to contemporary theory is understandable; for an intelligent man with a skeptical mind, the largely theoretical framework of learning built up by the Church and the disciples of Aristotle was too much to swallow. Unfortunately, his contempt for empty hypothesizing blinded him to the work of Copernicus and, possibly because of his meager knowledge of mathematics, he also ignored the monumental advances of Kepler and Galileo.

1He was less blunt than Hobbes in his ranking of the Aristotelian tradition: "When men write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad, or intend to make others so?"

Notes, page 1

Philo of Science

Despite his avoidance of theory, Bacon's works are not devoid of the kind of questions that troubled other philosophers. Thus he revolted against the concept of final causes (the belief that things were as they were for a purpose) and championed the idea of efficient causes (things were as they were because they were the effects of a preceding cause). And he used a very significant phrase which qualifies, in a most important way, his lauding of observation. He says that the mind has "a power of its own." He was aware that a mind that receives sense impressions without interpreting them and putting them into some kind of workable framework is incapable of grasping reality. For Bacon, reality, or rather our knowledge of it, contained an input from the mind.

Bacon grew up in the court circles of Queen Elizabeth I, and his ambitions were stupendous-politically as well as scientifically. The Lord Chancellor of England proclaimed famously, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province," by which he meant that he was going to define the directions and organize the categories of existent knowledge, an undertaking he thought he had completed in Instauratio Magna (1620).

There was a marvelous self-confidence about the way Bacon wrote. Despite his avowal to avoid the arrogance of the Aristotelians in his approach to nature, his implied humility in the presence of nature sometimes smells of a prosperous nineteenth-century Yorkshire mill owner avowing, "I'm a humble man." He was put on trial for corruption in 1621. For the last five years of his life, he was barred from holding public office and banished from the court of James I. He died of a fever that developed from a chill following an excursion into the snow: "It came to my lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt.... They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman's howse at the bottome of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my lord did help doe it himselfe."2 Perhaps the only experiment he ever did killed him. He died in debt, having failed in his attempt to create a system of philosophy to replace that of Aristotle.

Above all, Bacon left a legacy of belief in the evidence of the senses and in experiment, and a vision of the role of science as the means of improving the material condition of man. Bacon was not a scientist; neither can he be ranked among the great philosophers. Nevertheless, his sponsoring of inductive reasoning, arriving at general conclusions from the accumulation of facts, was enormously influential. He expounds the inductive method in his Novum Organum (1620), a title that could be translated as the New Instrument, meaning a new tool for arriving at the truth. Collect enough cases and you can generalize-that was his message. But first observe. It is natural that he admired Machiavelli for describing men as they are, not as the moralists hoped they would be.

Bacon's belief in the primacy, and reliability, of observation, and the magnificent prose that he used to convey his ideas indirectly affected the whole subsequent history of science. Although, like Descartes, he contributed little directly to knowledge, he helped to shape the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment and the following centuries. The Age of Reason, that great blossoming of free thought, acknowledged three prophets: Newton, Locke, and Bacon. Bacon's bold and prophetic vision of a world enriched by the practical consequences of science underlies nearly all applied research. Ironically, that vision was not based at all on the inductive reasoning that he so espoused, since science had done almost nothing in his day to improve the lot of man.

When the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), wrote to the politician Colbert to explain the aims of the newly established Academie des Sciences, in Paris, he explained, "La principale occupation de cette assemblee et la plus utile, doit titre, a mon avis, de travailler a 1'histoire naturelle a peu pres suivant le dessein de Verulamus."3 Bacon had been created Lord Verulam in 1618. A century and a half after Bacon's death, when Emmanuel Kant wrote his greatest work, The Critique of Pure Reason, he dedicated it to Bacon. In 1847, William Whewell, the Oxford scientist and philosopher, wrote, "If we must select some one philosopher as the hero of the revolution in scientific method, beyond all doubt Francis Bacon must occupy the place of honour."

The search for facts, the sacrosanct standing of observation, the implicit belief in reason-these were not the invention

2The account comes from Anthony Powell's entertaining edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives. Bacon's great contemporary, Descartes, also died as a consequence of cold, in this case the raw Swedish winters. 3“The principle occupation of this assembly, and the most useful, should be, in my opinion, to work on natural history in a manner similar to that of Verulam.”

Notes, page 2

Philo of Science

of one man. There is something to be said for the "time is ripe" school of history, the supposition that it is the total social, political, and scientific environment that makes inevitable the changing direction of man's thought. Nevertheless, every change has its standard-bearers, those whose flags are seen above the battle. Bacon was such a one. Video-clip summaries of world philosophy tend to oppose Bacon to Descartes, labeling one an empiricist and the other a rationalist. The classification has its justifications, but in both cases it needs qualification, and it is sometimes forgotten that they both, despite their different paths, saw reason and science as the hope of a better future for mankind. This belief is firmly linked to Bacon's name, but it is also stated very clearly in Descartes's Discours de la methode.

Does Bacon's observational approach at least help us to believe that molecules exist? He asks us to observe and, by employing inductive reasoning, use our observations to come to conclusions. This doesn't work too well with molecules since they are not observable, except in favorable cases in highly specialized laboratories. Nevertheless, if you are prepared to believe in the collective honesty of the international scientific community, you can accept their observations as standing in for yours.

Source: Brian Silver, The Ascent of Science (Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 15-18.

Bacon and the Baconian Method (from Dr. Robert A. Hatch’s page: http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/rhatch/pages/03-Sci-Rev/SCI-REV-Home/05-SR-OUTLINE.html) A. Opposition to Scholastic and Renaissance Philosophy: The Idols. 1. The Tribe: weaknesses of human nature, that is, prejudice, passions, limited mental and sensory faculties. 2. The Cave: weaknesses of environment, that is, education, habit, prejudice, predisposition of approach to philosophical-scientific questions. 3. The Market Place: semantic difficulties arising from confusing words with things. 4. The Theatre: philosophical systems or theories which direct the mind beyond the data of experience to

unsupported generalities. B. Basic Assumption: The Simplicity of Nature. 1. Scientific progress is a matter of finding the correct method, that is, the correct method is equivalent to

truth: a. If nature is approached in the appropriate manner, the truth can be found. b. Error is the result of defective methods. 2. The ultimate goal of science is practical utility for the benefit of mankind. 3. The method is the 'tool' of the intellect: it enables the mind to overcome its weaknesses, and can

compensate for disparity of mental ability. 4. The function of method is to collect data from the natural world and refashion it (the bee)--it is not just

empirical cataloguing (the ant) and it is not a matter of pure speculation (the spider). C. The Baconian Method. 1. The basic premise: observe nature with the senses--proceed inductively from observations (data) to

generalities (axioms), and form deductive conclusions which can be tested by experimental evidence. 2. The method of exclusion: a. Tabulate all possible causes of an observed effect. b. Observe nature to see what causes actually exist in the given physical circumstances. c. Exclude all but one, that is, the result of the crucial experiment.

Notes, page 3