BARBARA FRIEDBERG
(an independant scholar writing on issues of intellectual
method and a former science major, she has a doctorate in Engish
literature)
sirbacon.org
wishes to
acknowledge
Skeptical Inquirer
The Magazine for Science and Reason
for kind permission to reproduce this
essay which originally appeared in the
November/December 2000 issue Volume 24, No. 6
published bimonthly by the Committee
for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
(CSICOP) at http://www.csicop.org
Detractors of modern science sometimes refer to themselves as sceptics, because they dare to quetion long-accepted doctrine. But skepticism as a method is not just a resolve to disagree. It is the presumption of error and fallibility on which our science is based. This paradox was first put forth by Francis Bacon in The Novum Organum (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. Today, when people claim as a novel discovery that scientists are not god-like beings, that thought may be limited by emotions and culture, and that language is not the same as natural fact, they are merely reinterating Bacon's starting assumptions.
We think of the seventeenth century as a
golden age of science. Yet when Bacon considered the matter,
inquiry was busy but not very fruitful. Cosmology was up for
grabs, 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 deverted men from examining divinely created nature.
What was "a closer and purer league between....the experimental
and rational (such as has never yet been made)" Bacon 1960, 95.
(1)
Bacon saw that good thinking is a sort of
paradox. The mind is all too 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. Though Bacon didn't think of double-blind
testing, he saw that these stages must be made as distinct from
each other as possible (1960; 2, 50).
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
and don't let go.
"Idols of the Cave" were the individuals
limitations and enthusiasms. He may apply favorite ideas or
remedies to everything, like a wonder drug.
"Idols of the Marketplace" were the limitations of common
language, suitable for everyday life, but not to describe nature
accurately. "Substance," "heavy," and "dense" were all vauge
terms. New words must refer to measurably physical phenomena
(1960, 41-60).
In developing these ideas, Bacon outlined a devastating critique that might well doom any science. But he rejected the immobile skepticism, common at the time, which doubted whether any human theory about nature would ever be a clear advance. Some raise doubts, he said, as lawyers do, 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.
"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 disputations 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.)
Here Bacon aptly depicts that spongy
indecisiveness of mind that can masquerade as "being critical."
Today many academics, having grown uneasy about the concept of
seeking truth, deal mainly in ingenious detractions, aimed at
proving that various forms of supposed excellence are really (but
not "in truth") invidious shams (see Haack1999). If public debate
is mere entertainment and debunking is an automatic reflex with no
drive to find central, usuable insights, we are imitating the
learned men whom Bacon criticized, whose scholarship sought just
to get by according to some group's limited conventions. But Bacon
wanted people to address great issues and strive to be adequate to
their demands.
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. And this, in essence, has proven
true.
Unlike most revolutionaries (but like the
American founders), 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 rigourous test will be applied.)
Bacon's paradoxical
message—
the mind is faulty, the mind can achieve
wonders—
is usually misunderstood, ignored, or quoted
misleadingly.(2)
Yet it is at the heart of the mission of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. For
Bacon grasped that scientific method must be intimately linked
with a critique of pseudo-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.(3)
Bacon saw that the three Idols might generate whole systems of
belief, tightly inwoven , fiercely defended, securely
institutionalized, and thus hard to dislodge. His fourth category,
" Idols of the Theatre," referred 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 perenial. even Stephen J. Gould, in
a recent article, mentions only "outmoded," or "older,
traditional" systems as Bacon's target, rather than the
system-making propensity of the human mind.
(4)
Bacon did not envisage the mathematical physics to come; indeed,
he could hardly know what a powerful theory would look like. Thus
he thought more generally about the search for meaningful patterns
in the confusion of phenonona, 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( of something), 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 us spend more time with
tentative "middle principles." Pioneers such as Freud, eager to
make their ideas science, are in danger of taking any plausible
mechanism to be a universal principle. Bacon's reluctance to
assume uniformity, though misplaced in physics, is more pertinent
in studying human nature.
Bacon's list of features in Scholasticism that held back inquiry
is suprisingly 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).
hmedicine the ancient and the brand-new are equally valued for
that trait alone. Excessive quoting of a founder (whether Lenin or
Freud) whom experience has superseded suggests that one is not
trying to move on. Bacon thought Aristotle and others should be
treated as " counselors" to give advice, not "dictators" to
enforce belief. Thus he himself offered "not an opinion to be
held, but work to be done." (1874, 289; 1960, 16).
What Bacon called "contentious" learning originated in the twelfth
century as a laudable attempt to consider more thatn one view. but
the formal debate had become a mere contest in which flooring an
opponent took precedence over gaining new insight. Similarly,
modern talk shows, debates, and documentaries may virtuously state
contrasting views without working them over to reach new
insight.
|
Bacon's value is in pressing us to question the systems or
rhetorical habits of many modern gurus, from Hegel, Marx, and
Freud to Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. 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. Alexander Herzen, in
nineteenth-century Russia, discovered in Bacon's New
Organum a radicalism more exact than the left-wing Hegelianism
of his time. This quintessential liberal critic of right and left
extremes felt suprising affinity with Bacon's thought, as we may
also. (5)
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 safeguard's against error, encouraged renewed trust in reason alone. Descartes's influence also gave authority to the mathematical mind and reasserted the old hunger for intuitive certainty, in contrast with Bacon's portrayal of a tricky, self-doubting, circuitous quest.
In the 1660's, 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 has always prevented
sound discoveries. Specificlly,he rejected attempts to use the
book of Genesis as an authority for science (1960, 65).
But in the heyday of ntaural 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. The
historian of science Charles Gillispie points out the discrepancy
while offering another distortion. He derides Bacon for his
"popular" notion that science required "not difficult abstract
thought but only patience and the right method." he makes the
common mistake of assuming that some mechanical ascent from
experiment to theory is all that Bacon proposes (Gillispie 1951,
62-63; 1960, 81-82). Actually, Bacon's wished-for method of
constantly questioning and retesting one's thoughts, 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
hypothesis. And that is exactly what
has happened. These proposals (which have some limited value) are
usually cited as the Baconian method, then dismissed as
inadequate. Often, as Henry Bauer does in Scientific Literacy
and te Myth of Scientific Mehthod, critics proceed to their
own view of of what is important, ending up with reflections
similar to Bacon's about pitfalls in the mind (Bauer 1992, 19,
147-50) (6).
Bacon himself said that his positive proposals should be thrown
out if they don'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 is that Bacon's "method" is really a meta-method, 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 shadow blotting out
Bacon's meaning. A common
misconception is that he wanted science to aim at power instead of
truth.(7)
He is associated with with teh modern slogan, "knowledge is
power," which he did not say. Usually, people mean by it that
knowledge will bring us wordly triumph. Or, at best, that
knowledge brings power to humanity in the form of useful
technology. Bacon did not 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 you can
control it.
This simple idea, like John Dewey's "learning by doing," is
far-reaching in implication. It reflects an appreciation of how
people usually do behave: they talk highfalutin nonsense that is
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
worldplay (1874, III, 282).
Bacon's hope of eventual technology is regularly confused
with his methodological concern with experiment (power) to verify
knowledge.(8)
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, 294-5).
In the Advancement of Learning, Bacon explained that by
"use" he didn't mean achieving wealth or sucess, but what would be
"solid and fruitful" as opposed to "vain and fantastical." It is
real knowledge, it has implications; it leads on, and makes one
want to try it out. The hypothetical path to concrete reality
should be intelligble, however complex. Sometimes people embrace
dense ideologies of politics or psychoanalysis while avoiding the
question,"But how exactly will any of this help?" even though
their stated purpose is social reform or healing.
Grand philosophical questions are the
fruit of struggle with some human problem. If their adherents
retreat to obscurantism, often they have failed and refused to
admit it. When Krushchev (a Baconian at times) asserted that there
is "no Communism without sausages," the Marxist-Lenin experts in
Moscow saw him as a buffoon. But his down-to-earth concern about
hunger was part of a drive to truth that also made him speak out
about Stalin and recognize the madness of nuclear war.
(9)
What is called "utility" or "pragmatism" can be given different
slants. William James tended to accept the practical value of
ideas (loosely applied) that might not strictly be true. George
Orwell, in 1984, showed the dire everyday consequences of
living by lies. For Bacon, practice proved the worth of ideas, but
also (as for Orwell) showed the failure of false ones.
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,
as we are now, by adroit rhetoricians who refused to accept that
words sometimes succeed and sometimes fail to get close the the
things they pruport 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.
Our literary-aesthetic traditions place
great value on the metaphorical use of words that reached its
height in the poetry of Bacon's day. This drew on the very habits
of symbolism that Bacon saw must be eliminated from strict
science, which uses language differently. The query, " Is
this really love?" will never fully parallel, " Is this
really iron?" We have agreed-upon tests to determine that a thing
is iron. Love is an open concept, and iron, since modern
chemistry, a closed one.
Science adds knowledge by showing what can't be. Mystical thinking
sets no such bounds. Its glory is to give meaning to evry
perceived pattern, and its method permits any number of meanings
apply. Sensitivity in pursuing metaphors is essential to art; it
is needed only sparingly in science. Today, the revivers of
pre-scientific medicine often use language evocatively, as
advertisers do, piling on terms without indicating and proving
what thing does what. Attempting to heal by suggestion or placebo
is not alternative, but "aesthetic" medicine.
In setting himself against such habits, Bacon was indeed saying
that the aesthetic way of thought could not be the scientific one,
and people have been saying "ouch!" ever since. But should they?
Must we have one big thing, the unified art-science that has
become so fashionable a craving, rather than two different,
equally valuable things? Must the universe melt down into a
beautiful dream of our
own—
can it not be seen as a separate thing that we must specially
equip our minds to decipher?
Science seeks ways to give a definite "no" to a plausible idea; in
literature, plausibility is all. If a Shakespeare Play has many
interpretations, we say it is rich and complex. If a natural
phenomenon does, we say the science is incomplete. Art frees us by
creating a refuge against the time flux, but science frees us by
enabling us to "command" nature by " obeying" her. It uses
necessity to create freedom, as art uses freedom to create its own
formal necessity.
Art may spur us to a scientific inkling; science, to an aesthetic
one but that is all. The distinction should be cherished, not
broken down. It permits us to value our mental motions for their
own sake, or to adapt them for use in action without confusion or
self-deception.
|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 madding
crowd. 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 no science that today
would have won him a Nobel prize. he founded no schools of
philosophy. He was not, like Aristotle, " the master of them that
know." But he was the friend of those
who think, and for that reason, his writings should not be laid
aside.
Notes
1.
References in the text to the aphorisms in Bacon 1960 give the
aphorism number put in Arabic numerals (all in Book I) for
convenience in consulting other editions. References to The
Advancement of Learning are those cited from Bacon 1874, Vol.
III.
2.For
a detailed account of how Bacon's actual words are ignored and old
misconceptions continually revived, followed by dismissive
attacks, see Vickers (1992). As a counterpoise, he recommends
Urbach 1987 and Perez-Ramos 1990.
3.
Needless to say, history contradicts James McClenon's claim that
"pseudo-science" is a recent conception invented out of
sociological need. He suggests that "science arose from a type of
innovation but was forced to create deviant sciences just to
survive." Actually, that "crucial innovation" was precisely to
reject older methods similar to those of today praised as
"deviant" by McClendon (1974, 30).
4.
Gould 1999, 74-5. Unlike most citers of Bacon, Gould does
appreciate the centrality of the Idols.
5.
Herzen's interest in Bacon was only appreciated recently by Aileen
Kelly (1980). Francois Roustang writes of his disillusionment with
the psycchoanalyst Jacques Lacan in terms that also parallel
Bacon's critique of mereticious systems (though not referring to
Bacon). The antiempericist Lacan spoke, for example, of "the fatal
contamination of analytical knowledge by the effects of
practice"—
i.e., seeing patients (1990,10).
6.
Despite his disparagement of a "myth" in his title, Bauer finds
that, yes, Virginia, there is a scientific method, consisting of
"reality testing," since (as Bacon might have put it) beyond
science "stands nature, which we cannot force to behave in any
other way than what comes naturally" (150).
7.
As by Gerald Horton, who makes a misleading contrast between
Bacon's "research program," aiming at "omnipotence," and Newton's,
aiming at "omniscience" : "basic" versus "applied" science. But
Bacon sought basic science and truth, just as Newton tied theory
and experiment together as Bacon wished. Holton's book aims to
distinguish science from " the world-view against which Descartes
and Galileo fought," pointedly omitting Bacon (1993, 109, 114-5,
119).
8.
As by Neil Postman (1992). His important critique of our cultural
submission to technology cites Bacon as exclusively concerned with
"Power and Progress." And yet, like Bauer (1992), he concludes
with intellectual concerns similar to Bacon's.
9.
Khruschev's 1954 question, "and what sort of Communist society is
it that has no sausage?" caused Molotov to disparage him as a
"practicist." In 1958, Khrushchev said that he was proud to be one
(Frankland 1967, 148).
References
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Organum. Ed. by Fulton Anderson New York : Macmillan (reprint
of translation of Novum Organum in Bacon 1874 below) The
Works of Francis Bacon (14 vols.). Ed by J. Spedding, D.D.
Heath , and R.L. Ellis. London : Longman.]
Barnouw, Jeffrey. 1978. Active Experience vs. Wish-Fulfillment in
Francis Bacon's Moral Psychology of Science. The Philosophical
Forum (1978: 78-99.
Bauer, Henry. 1992. Scientific Literacy and the Myth of
Scientific Method., Urbana, Ill., University of Illonois
Press
Butterfield, Herbert. 1957. The Origins of Modern Science
(rev. ed). New York: The Free Press
Frankland, Mark. 1967. Krushchev. New York : Stein and
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. 1960 The Edge of Objectivity : An Essay in the History
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Gould, Stephen Jay. 1999. Bacon Brought Home. Natural
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Haack, Susan. 1999. A fallibilst among the cynics.
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Kelly, Aileen. 1980. The Destruction of Idols : Alexander
Herzen and Francis Bacon. Journal of the History of Ideas
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McClendon, James. 1974. Deviant Science : The Case of
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Peltonen, Markku. (ed.). 1996. The Cambridge Companion to
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Paolo Rossi, "Bacon's Idea of Science," 25-46.).
Perez-Ramos. 1998. Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the
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Press.
Postman, Neil. 1992. Technopoly. New York : Knopf.
Roustang, Francois. 1990. The Lacanian Delusion.
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Vickers, Brian. 1992. Francis Bacon and the Progress of Knowledge.
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