Knowledge in Modern Philosophy

Stephen Gaukroger, Stephen Gaukroger

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781474258449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History presents the history of one of Western philosophy's greatest challenges: understanding the nature of knowledge. Divided chronologically into four volumes, it follows conceptions of knowledge that have been proposed, defended, replaced, and proposed anew by ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary philosophers. This volume covers questions of science and religion in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the work of Descartes, Hobbes, Kant and Leibniz. With original insights into the vast sweep of ways in which philosophers have sought to understand knowledge, The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History embraces what is vital and evolving within contemporary epistemology. Overseen by an international team of leading philosophers and featuring 50 specially-commissioned chapters, this is a major collection on one of philosophy's defining topics.

1

Bacon

Matthew Sharpe

1.Introduction

It was the historian Stephen Beasley Linnard Penrose (1934: 1–2) who commented thus:

Few philosophers have suffered greater variation in ... reputation ... throughout the history of modern philosophy than has Francis Bacon. Carried by eighteenth century thought to a commanding position as the ‘greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers’ he was plunged in the nineteenth century to the despicable status of a man whose scientific method was never used by any real scientist, whose effect upon the advancement of science was, if anything, detrimental ... The only philosopher who could come close to being favourably compared with him was Aristotle, or Plato; and yet there were few men in the history of philosophy who had not made greater contribution to knowledge than had Bacon.¹

In the second half of the twentieth century, Bacon’s stocks dropped even lower. The philosophical Lord Chancellor was now hailed by Adorno and Horkheimer (1989), then Caroline Merchant (2006), as the harbinger of the modern world’s destructive, instrumental approach to understanding nature. The culmination of Baconianism on these views lay in totalitarian governance and environmental degradation. Bacon has been arraigned as a cold-hearted proponent of the Machiavellian claim that knowledge is power. It was Bacon who is supposed to have put an end to the ancient and medieval valuation of the contemplative ideal of inquiry (Sargent 1996). It was he who, by advocating for a collective form of natural philosophy, ended the classical tradition for which the pursuit of knowledge both requires and engenders ethical edification in inquirers.² Bacon was a naïve empiricist. His experimental idea of natural philosophy leads only to chaotic compilations of facts. Baconianism hopelessly undervalues the role of the formation and testing of hypotheses in scientific practice and progress.³ Or else his ‘scientific method’ maintains, impossibly, ‘that absolute truth can be discovered in science by applying a purely mechanical procedure’ (Urbach 1982).

Bacon’s divided reception reflects the complexity of the man. The author of essays on civic and moral subjects, of a book of apothegms and one devoted to classical mythology, an elegant stylist and a celebrated orator, hymned by contemporaries as the ‘tenth muse’ to bring the choir together (Rawley 1626), Bacon stands as an uncanny colossus astride the straits adjoining the modern world and the renaissance, the new sciences and classical letters.

Francis Bacon was born in 1561, the son of the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. He was educated for a career in the law and served as a member of Parliament. Yet the young Bacon soon bridled at the prospect of an exclusively active, public life. In a famous letter to his patron, Lord Burley, in 1592, Bacon (1753) confesses that ‘I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province ... This, whether it be curiosity, or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed’. Moreover, Bacon seems to have developed from his time at Cambridge University a lively sense of the limitations of the education on offer there, led by Aristotle and the schoolmen. Bacon’s famous 1603 ‘Proem’ to Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature tells us that it was as a young man that he conceived the need for, and vision of, a radical renewal of learning. Bacon (1893: 35) was struck by the deficiencies of the present understandings of natural philosophy, and their failure to have produced almost any new inventions since Archimedes that ministered to ‘the glory of the creator and the relief of man’s estate’. It was perhaps as early as the 1560s, then, that Bacon (1868: 84–5) began to envisage what became his ‘novum organum’ for understanding the natural world, to replace the old Aristotelian organon:

[A]‌bove all, if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature – a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so spreading further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world – that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race.

Nevertheless, Bacon (1869: Bk 1, sec. 120) published no writings before around 1600 devoted to his vision of ‘laying a foundation in the human understanding for a holy Temple after the model of the World’: what he calls ‘the great instauration’. A series of earlier, unpublished drafts survive, in which Bacon (1964: 43) experiments with different literary forms to communicate and win sponsors for his radical program: ‘He tries Latin, he tries English. He wonders if a dramatic monologue will not be more effective than a straight exposition. At one moment he is violently polemical, at the next urbane. He wonders whether it would not be best to suppress his own name and write under a pseudonym.’ Bacon’s entire oeuvre remains fragmented and pointedly incomplete. This adds considerably to the difficulty of achieving a comprehensive understanding of his theory of knowledge, or his persona more widely. Bacon’s two most famous, systematic philosophical works are The Advancement of Learning of 1605 (expanded and translated into Latin in 1623 as De Augmentis Scientiarum) and the Novum Organum of 1620. The first work represents the first of six projected parts of the Great Instauration, the second work (which remained incomplete) as its second part. Book II of the Novum Organum contains Bacon’s fullest extant account of his new ‘organon’ for the ‘art of interpreting Nature’. It is accompanied by the much shorter Parasceve. This work provides a series of instructions for the compiling of newly systematic forms of natural history. It thus speaks to the third part of the projected Great Instauration. Bacon himself completed several such natural histories in the last decade of his life, including histories on the winds, the prolongation of life, and density and rarity. There is also the intriguing collection of 1,000 experimental observations known as the Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon’s most popular work in the seventeenth century).

At least five interconnected projects are undertaken in Bacon’s philosophical works. The first, achieved centrally in The Advancement of Learning/De Augmentis, is a comprehensive critical survey of all existing branches of human and divine knowledge. These Bacon (1893: 69) groups into forms of history (which he aligns with the human memory), poesy (aligned with imagination), and philosophy (aligned with reason). The second is an explanation of the deficiencies in extant learning disclosed by this magisterial survey. For these deficiencies, Bacon (1869: Bk 1, secs 38–91) seeks out what he terms ‘signs’ and causes, both in the institutions and practices of established forms of learning, and in the human mind itself. Third, and of arguably most enduring significance, is Bacon’s account of induction in Novum Organum II, alongside his rules for the compilation of natural histories. Fourth are Bacon’s own attempts at what we would call scientific inquiries into specific phenomena. Finally, there are Bacon’s own speculative physical and metaphysical claims, including a post-Aristotelian theory of forms and of kinds of natural motion (Bk 1, secs 1–10; Bk 2, sec. 48), which Bacon sometimes aligns with forms of atomistic pre-Socratic natural philosophy.⁴

In the introductory account of Bacon’s ‘epistemology’ that follows, we will focus preeminently on the second and third of these projects. Section 2 looks at Bacon’s critique of existing forms of philosophizing, in particular natural philosophy. The culmination of this pars destruens comes in Bacon’s famous delineation of four ‘idols of the mind’. This is what we might call an ‘epistemic psychology’ which hearkens back to the Advancement and earlier texts (Bacon 1869: Bk 1, secs 42–65). Section 3 looks at Bacon’s account of induction in the Novum Organum book II, alongside the prescriptions concerning the compilation of natural histories in the Parasceve and elsewhere. As we proceed, we shall introduce readers to some of the debates, and correct several of the false impressions surrounding Bacon’s oeuvre that have arisen at different times: what Dana Jalobeanu (2013) has called ‘the idols of Baconian scholarship’.

2.Pars destruens: anticipations of nature and the idols of the mind

In aphorism III of Novum Organum book I, Francis Bacon (1869: Bk 1, sec. 3) makes the famous pronouncement that ‘[k]‌nowledge and human power are synonymous’. This Baconian oracle seems to wholly politicize inquiry. Or else it seems to reduce all epistemic pursuits to so many branches of technical, even mechanical activity. It is true that Bacon admired aspects of the mechanical arts. One ‘sign’ of the limitations of premodern natural philosophy, for Bacon (Bk 1, secs 69–77), was that it had generated no new inventions of practical utility since the Roman imperium, save the printing press, compass, and canon. Like the mechanical philosophy simultaneously being forged by Galilei Galileo on the continent, Bacon (1893: 70–1) challenges the ancient oppositions of mind versus hand, and natural versus artificial (manufactured) things. ‘The sun enters alike the palace and the privy’, he echoes the Cynics. And ‘that which is deserving of existence is deserving of knowledge, the image of existence’ (Bacon 1869: Bk 1, sec. 120).

Bacon admired the cumulative progress of the mechanical trades, with expertise being passed down the generations. This he favourably contrasts with many other branches of learning that have not progressed beyond commentary on ancient masters. Nevertheless, it is untrue to Bacon (1863a) to pursue this thought too far. ‘I care little about the mechanical arts themselves’, he clarifies, ‘only about those things which they contribute to the equipment of philosophy’ (381). The mechanic arts as they stand ‘take but small light from natural philosophy’, Bacon (1955a: 393) writes in a characteristic passage in the Filum Labarynthi (c. 1607), ‘and do but spin on their own little threads’. In a celebrated analogy (1869: Bk 1, sec. 90), he positions these mechanics, alongside the alchemists, as like ‘ants’ that collect information more or less blindly, without any larger orientation. ‘The present method of experiment is blind and stupid’, Novum Organum complains (Bk 1, sec. 70): ‘hence men wandering and roaming without any determined course, and consulting mere chance, are hurried about to various points, and advance but little’. Bacon’s epistemology then does not, contra some images, praise the unordered collections of facts as a sufficient goal of inquiry.

Bacon is better known for his criticism of Aristotle and his medieval and early modern scholastic admirers (Bk 1, sec. 90): less ants than ‘spiders [that] spin out their own webs’. As with the mechanicals, Aristotle’s model of natural philosophy rests on a basis of inadequate observation of the natural world. Above all, the theoretical account of ‘induction’ or epagôgê in Posterior Analytic II 19 is radically deficient, as an account of how we can discover new axioms or principles about the natural world – although Bacon (1964: 42) can express admiration for Aristotle’s History of Animals. In line with this inadequate account of how we adduce our first principles, Aristotelian epistêmê overvalues deduction and dialectical reasoning. Accordingly, it illustrates what he will call in the Novum Organum an ‘idol of the cave’, the extrapolation of a mode of inquiry beyond its proper bounds: ‘and I appeal to your memories, son, and ask whether in his Physics and Metaphysics you do not hear the voice of dialectic more often than the voice of nature’ (112). This criticism informs one of Bacon’s (1893: 66) several concerns with the University teaching of his time: ‘which is, that scholars in universities come too soon and too unripe to logic and rhetoric’. At base, Bacon charges Aristotle with confusing invention in argument (a canon of rhetoric, and a dialectical technique modelled in the Topics) with the invention or discovery of natural principles (1–6). A valid argument may not be sound. One resting on a ‘first digestion’ of false or undiscerning premises can only yield erroneous conclusions: ‘The syllogism consists of propositions; propositions of words; words are the signs of notions. If, therefore, the notions (which form the basis of the whole) be confused and carelessly abstracted from things, there is no solidity in the superstructure’ (1869: Bk 1, sec. 14). Bacon comments that ‘this art of [deductive] judgment is but the reduction of propositions to principles in a middle term’ – as in the syllogism, ‘Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; so, Socrates is mortal.’ If we do not have adequate procedures assuring us then that our middle terms capture real forms in nature, ‘the principles to be agreed by all [are] exempted from argument; the middle term to be elected at the liberty of every man’s invention’ (1893: 130).

Bacon coins the term ‘anticipations of nature’ in the Novum Organum I for the kinds of inadequate principles that he saw as shaping the alchemical and peripatetic natural philosophies alike gleaned from too little or too unsystematic forms of observation. ‘The axioms now in use’, Bacon (1869: Bk 1, sec. 25) claims, ‘are derived from a scanty handful ... of experience, and a few particulars of frequent occurrence, whence they are of much the same dimensions or extent as their origin’. They force assent, but do not reflect or shape things (Bk 1, sec. 29).

It is against the background of this fundamental criticism of the natural philosophies of his day that ...