English philosopher of
science, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the forerunner of the famed British
school of philosophers that include John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, J.
S. Mill and Bertrand Russell. Bacon’s important works include The Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis
and the Novum Organum. Bacon was also
an essayist and enjoyed a successful legal and political career, in particular
after James I’s succession of Elizabeth, whereupon he was made Lord Chancellor
until being found guilty of corruption.
Attributed as the
originator of the saying “knowledge is power,” his importance as a philosopher is
most notable with regard to his concern
for scientific method. Bacon was troubled by the two schools of thought
that had come out of Platonism and Aristotelianism respectively. Firstly, the
rationalist view that knowledge could be gained by examining the content and
meanings of works – a view Bacon dismissed as like spinning a web from the
inside of one’s own head. Secondly, the Aristotelians, intent on collecting masses
of empirical data, where equally useless at helping a man arrive at any
scientific hypotheses. What was needed, insisted Bacon, was a new way of
collecting and organising data that would help generate inductive hypotheses.
Bacon, like many of his
contemporaries and predecessors, had been concerned with the problem of induction,
a problem that would later receive an astonishingly sceptical response from
David Hume. The problem of induction, as Bacon’s contemporaries saw it, was
that the mere repetitive occurrence of an incident does not guarantee that the
same thing will happen again. To give a simple example, suppose a man draws
nine blue marbles out of a bag of ten (9/10). It is no more likely that the
tenth marble will be blue than it is that it will be red. The previous
instances do not guarantee anything about the following instance.
Bacon saw that the answer
to this problem lay in placing the emphasis of investigation on looking for
negative instances to disconfirm hypotheses, rather than finding ways of
confirming them. This is striking precursor to Karl Popper’s twentieth century falsificationist
scientific methodology and his much vaunted claim of ‘solving the problem of
induction.’ As Popper readily admits, he owes much to Francis Bacon.
However, unlike others of
his time and later David Hume, Bacon was
less interested in the problem of justifying inductive generalisations, than in
how to generate good inductive hypotheses out of the masses of data collected
by observation. Bacon revised a new method. To illustrate it, Bacon shows
how one might generate a hypothesis on the nature of heat. One should, Bacon
tells us, list all those things in which the property under investigation, in
this case heat, is present, then all those things in which the property is
absent and finally all those cases which admit of varying degrees of the
property in question. From such list, Bacon believes the natural hypothesis
will present itself, which in this case, as he well knew at the time, is that
heat is produced according to the movement or excitation of molecules within a
body.
Although Bacon’s method is
undoubtedly one way of applying order to a body of data, and even perhaps a
useful way in some cases, it nevertheless seems unlikely to fulfil his
ambition, which was to find a systematic
way of deriving scientific hypotheses from the arrangement of data. It is
unlikely that there ever could be such a system. Bacon failed to take into
account the creativity and imaginative aspect of scientific theory building. No
matter how systematically one organises data, inductive hypotheses cannot be
guaranteed to appear out of them. One may find that some facts deductively
follow from a certain ordering of data, but that is not what Bacon was after.
Despite his failure in
this regard, Bacon nevertheless made some important contribution to the
philosophy of science and the problem of induction, not least, as we have seen,
in being the first to stress the importance of negative instances.
[Summarized from
Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012. Also watch YouTube 60 Second Philosophy: Francis Bacon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsScx7oeHOs]
Lord, Give
Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)
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