Ep. 226: Francis Bacon Invents Science (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 226 is something like, how should we investigate nature? And we read Sir Francis Bacon's new Organon from 1620. For more information and a link to the text, visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer discovering my middle axioms in middle age in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:23 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying to melt butter with wine in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:28 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey affecting a complete solution and separation of nature via the divine fire of my mind in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Mark: So, hey, the birth of the scientific method. If we actually want to address the divergences between philosophy and science and the potential hostility that they have even in the modern age, with some scientists saying, philosophy's all obsolete, it's useless, it's not practical. And really, we should use a scientific method to examine everything versus the philosopher saying, no, no, no, that's scientism. That's we need to be careful. We need to set limits to science. Well, we got sort of the birth of some of those conflicts right here in Bacon's outlining something that looks a little like the scientific method. Yep.

1:11 Wes: I would say a lot.

1:12 Dylan: It looks just like science. I mean, it straight up looks just like science. In fact, it straight up looks like it in exactly what you said, Mark, in the conflicts about what science can do successfully and not successfully. It's all there.

1:30 Wes: Secondary sources will point to differences between some of Bacon's exhortations, some of what he's encouraging, and what actually the scientific method ended up being. But he gets at some things that are extraordinarily important. And I actually thought a lot of Lucretius reading this text, because I think we saw a lot of this, you know, with Lucretius and Epicurus and the whole idea that there's something to be investigated in nature which is, first of all, invisible or hard to see, and second of all, not qualitatively related to the phenomena it explains, but quantitatively.

That's the revolutionary thing that Lucretius does with atoms, this idea that quantities of extension and motion can add up to emergent phenomena. And we're going to see the same sort of idea here, along with a bunch of ideas about how best you can get at the deeper structure of things, whether it's just observation or whether we have to poke at nature and see what it does in order to get where we want to go.

2:28 Mark: This is made up of two books. So the first one and the preface really are both about method. It's less about here are the step by step procedures for uncovering scientific things. But here's what we are arguing against as something that happened in a particular historical moment. We're at the end of the Renaissance, so we'd already come out of the Dark Ages. A lot of the discoveries that we associate with the foundation of science were already underway or had been performed. But there was still among natural philosophers, perhaps a dominant paradigm of Aristotle of letting authority guide your investigations in dogmatism, that, oh, this is just established doctrine, Whether it's Aristotle boasted by the church or just there was very conservative scientific environment as far as Bacon was concerned.

So as far as his exhortations to stop all that, to actually pay attention to nature, to perform experiments, points at just how much of history there has been and how few points where, you know, like in ancient Greece where we have Epicurus, or like in ancient Rome where we have Lucretius and then among the present days, the Renaissance, really what he's talking about, how there should have been, if people were armed with something like the scientific method, actually paying attention to nature, there should have been steady progress throughout all that time.

But instead you have a few bright spots. And now he thinks that even his present age has sort of settled down to sterility. So it's awesome what he did in breaking out of that. And so that's what we see in this book one, Book two gets into more the specifics of what he sees. The scientific method is involving, which is laying various things out on tables. And there might be some analogues between what actual scientists do in this method, but nobody does this actual thing in this way. And apparently according to the secondary sources, very few people even at the time did things in exactly this way.

Though maybe Darwin's Origin of Species, he specifically said this is a Baconian thing Darwin did. So the amount of examples and case studies and things that are laid out in Origin of Species, which are supposed to then push toward the general theory of natural selection, might be a good example of something close to Baconian practice actually realized.

4:43 Wes: I just want to add one qualification to the history. We discussed this a little bit in our Lucretius episode, but the Renaissance was really prompted by a rediscovery of ancient texts, not by a leaving of them behind. Somehow a lot of that had been actually lost and, you know, some of it preserved in the Middle Ages. And that's where some of the obsession with Aristotle comes from. And the Church and all that, but for the most part that had been lost and people got excited when, say, De rerum Natura was rediscovered and Sextus Empiricus, to whom Descartes is basically directly responding.

A lot of this stuff, you know, we mentioned last time Stephen Greenblatt's book called the Swerve on Lucretius and is a very strong claim, which is disputable, but that modern science was basically born of the rediscovery of that text in particular. But whether or not you agree with that, you can see a direct relation between the rediscovery of these texts and thinking about them and then the development of modern science.

5:49 Dylan: I also want to make a kind of qualification in that you see this in Bacon and you see this a certain kind of hatred of ancients displayed by Descartes. I think it needs to be made sense of in the context of what Mark called the authority going on. So the authority particular of Aristotle within the scholastic tradition and the dogmatism that Bacon rails against in this book, they're all railing against it and sometimes they sweep in the ancients in a particular way and Aristotle in particular as being the progenitor of this dogmatic authority.

And I think that if you just take the simplest casual look at it, you'll find out that it's not Aristotle that you have to lay that at, it's some other activity regarding the notion of authority. And I think you can see that even in today's arguments about the authority of science, and that there is something deeply anti authoritarian about what Bacon's talking about, and you would even apply that disposition to the implementation of scientific inquiry and scientific institutions themselves.

7:02 Mark: So it's interesting just in starting to get specific here, to point out an obvious. Since we brought up Lucretius a couple times and his atomism, the way in which Bacon specifically rejects atomism and why he does that, it's not because he's, you know, done a full investigation and has determined that there couldn't be something like, you know, Adam is floating in the void is not his view. But he puts this specifically in terms of the way in which fundamental physical laws or fundamental metaphysical pictures are developed by the ancients. I'm looking at page 20 in our version.

That's 66. Another considerable evil is that men in their systems and contemplations, bestow their labor upon the investigation and discussion of the principles of things and the extreme limits of nature, although all utility and means of action consist in the intermediate objects. Hence men cease not to abstract nature until they arrive at potential and shapeless matter and still persist in their dissection till they arrive at atoms. And yet, were all this true, it would be of little use to advance man's estate. So that seems crazy, given the practical applications we have of the atomic theory, you know, chemistry.

8:06 Dylan: But those aren't the same atoms that he's talking about there.

8:09 Mark: Yeah, he sees this as speculative. He sees this as a speculative metaphysical theory.

8:14 Dylan: Exactly.

8:14 Wes: And he will end up. Not to spoil things, but he will end up talking about heat. He gives this explanation of heat in terms of the motion of particles. That sounds something like the accurate scientific explanation. And so you have to wonder about that tension. And I think here he's thinking of these very speculative metaphysical atoms, and I think he's underestimating the extent to which that was actually useful and that bit of speculation that it was made in a more scientific spirit than other sorts of, say, final cause explanation. But what we'll see in this is this warning against jumping from a few instances to these very, very general abstractions without first working one's way up a ladder. And he wants us to pay more attention to specific phenomena and to experimentation before we advance those types of theories.

9:12 Dylan: He wants to get to truths then. They may be abstract ultimately, but he wants them tied very firmly to actual phenomena in the world. And in that way, his griping about this reminds me a lot of the way an experimentalist would gripe about a theorist, even in physics today.

9:32 Wes: Say something about that.

9:33 Dylan: Well, let's take an example of string theory in elementary particle physics. One common complaint, in fact, I just read a whole book about complaining about this by another theoretical physicist, that the claims for the truth of string theory lie very much in aesthetic judgments of the mathematics, rather than tying it to phenomena in the world.

9:55 Mark: So this whole thing, he's arguing for proper induction, which is make observations, make as many observations as you can. And a lot of the second half of the book here is pointing out places in which it seems like observations are profitable. So it's not really just entirely unfocused listing of observations about the world. There's no way that you would get from that to any kind of generalization. But if you're actually looking for commonalities. So again, heat is the example at the beginning of book two, and he has these tables where he lays out all the instances of heat sort of wherever they occur and try to get at kind of what they have in common. Can we disqualify some things that present in some cases, but not in others?

10:35 Wes: So not just commonalities, but exceptions and gradations. So heat is not always produced by light, for instance, even though scientists don't do this table thing. You see the beginnings of scientific method in this because you develop some falsifiable hypothesis, say, what's heat about? Well, it's just when light hits something, it's a very obvious sort of experiment. You easily rule out that theory, but that's what he's doing. They're experiments of sorts.

11:04 Dylan: And in particular, you start with everyday things that you observe, and for whatever reason you call them, in this case, heat.

11:11 Wes: And.

11:12 Dylan: And you say something's hot, and you start lumping all these phenomena together and you start slicing and dicing them. In what ways are they the same? In what ways are there exceptions? In what way are they different? And you're doing this intellectual exercise of figuring out where you're basically putting the facts in different piles, where your main thing is to try to figure out what you actually mean by heat and figure out what instances in the world most embody that, and which ones can you put to the side and say, well, that's sort of like heat, but it's really not exactly what I mean when I think about it.

And as Wes just said, you test it out, you come up with new ways to see if one thing is really like another, like you suspected in the tables, he gives examples like X should be tried, and this should be tried, and I will try this in order to, even if it hasn't been done yet, put forth the plan for how to separate out what is really salient about, in this case, heat versus

12:14 Wes: what's not, what happens when you put butter into alcohol, that sort of thing.

12:20 Mark: Aphorism 19, which. These aphorisms, it starts out, they're actually aphoristic, like they're paragraphs. When we get later, like an aphorism might really be a chapter. They're pretty Damn long. But 19. Here of book one, there are and can exist but two ways of investigating and discovering truth. The one hurries on rapidly from the senses in particulars to the most general axioms, and from them as principles and their supposed indisputable truths, derives and discovers the intermediate axioms. This is the way now in use. The other constructs its axioms from the senses and particulars by ascending continually and gradually till it finally arrives at the most general axioms, which is the true but unattempted way.

So we might argue. I certainly don't have enough historical knowledge to argue whether this has really been unattempted. I don't think we see in Lucretius like how he came up. It's more. Here's an elaboration of this worldview as opposed to my raw observations and some sort of intermediate generalization.

13:19 Wes: Lucretius does do a lot of thought experiments, right? He says, well, suppose it weren't atoms. Well, then we would see all these quantum irregular phenomena in nature, or we would see animals giving birth to different species and we wouldn't see gestation. All these. All these sorts of thought experiments. You see the similarity there in what he's doing. So he's thinking about natural phenomena in a very broad sense, and he's thinking in terms of these counterfactuals, which always have the structure of an experiment. So it's not the replacement for a real experiment, but it's a beginning.

13:56 Dylan: It matters in a interesting intellectual history way about whether or not other people have been thinking about what Bacon was thinking about, and also whether or not Bacon's judgment about the prominence of dogmatism and the lack of experimentation was right or not. But we can, at least from here in what we have before us, understand what he thought was problematic, like his point of view on it. He clearly thought that the way of interacting with the world amongst intellectuals, scientists, philosophers at the time was not quantitatively grounded and spent a lot of time in speculation that wasn't tied to our senses at all.

At this beginning of the book, he's regularly railing against the power of the syllogism, which to him, the key there is that you end up only having logical deductions that are constrained by things that you already know. They're always dependent upon the original premises. And he is most interested in discovering the new. And firmly is in the camp that we don't know everything there is to know about the world and that there's lots left to know. The only way we'll do that is by developing new premises, not by syllogisms, because those rely on the fact that the premises were already true.

So he wants to bring forth a new way of interacting with the world and new knowledge about it.

15:19 Wes: Yeah, interaction is key there. Right. So it's not just that we can't rely on abstract syllogizing, but it's also that we can't strictly rely on observation. If observation just means sitting around looking at things as they are, as they happen to appear naturally we actually have to do things. And this is part of what he means, I think, by knowledge is power. In the third aphorism, you get to know the causes of things by forcing certain effects out of them. You don't just wait to see what particular causes and effects are already lined up. You start doing things, and then you can notice new effects.

And it's at 24 that he seems to be talking about developing and testing hypotheses. So he says, this is page 10 of ours. Axioms determined upon in argument can never assist in the discovery of new effects, for the subtlety of nature is vastly superior to that of argument. But axioms properly and regularly abstracted from particulars easily point out and define new particulars and therefore impart activity to the sciences. I might be reaching here, but I think when he's talking about this idea of axioms pointing out and defining new particulars, we might think of the axiom as a hypothesis and the new particulars as our predictions.

And then we see if we actually get what we predict when we do something. And the activity there, Well, I think it'd be kind of a reach to say that that's the doing of things, but the performing of experiments. I think that there's some relation here.

16:56 Mark: Yeah, I'm really interested here in the evolution of the language, how he uses axioms here. And clearly it's because he's coming out of this scholastic and ultimately Aristotelian tradition. We should talk about the forms which come down to natural laws. Basically, it doesn't mean what form means in Aristotle at all. And he's very explicit about this. He says, I'm going to keep using the term form just because people talk that way. But, you know, using axiom here, which sounds geometrical, it sounds like it comes from syllogistic logic. I just did a search on in the book hypothesis or hypotheses, and those terms are only used a total of 15 times in the text.

And just looking through them, usually it's negatively. It's like some theory that somebody has. Like what he was saying, the atomic theory is for the ancient Greeks that they hold dogmatically without good reason. I do see, for instance, on page 71, book 2, section 18, For it is clear from what has been said that every contradictory instance destroys a hypothesis as to the form. So that sounds like, yeah, a hypothesis is something you dangle out to test it. So the seeds of the modern use are here. But, you know, if you're writing a how to book on the scientific method now, like, the word hypothesis would be all over the damn place.

It would be used in exactly this. Something we're holding provisionally as an experiment to be tested, not Dogmatic assertion.

18:22 Dylan: I was looking for where it was in the book. But he is adamant on the one hand that we're going to find true things. So he's against the skeptics in this respect, that there are things about the world that are knowable and that they are true. But it's also the case that you would maintain an anti dogmatic stance with respect to them. Even the things that you decided were true were always up for grabs. That aspect of it to me is what I would point to most as being quintessentially the scientific method of inquiry, of expecting that there's truth about the world based upon quantitative observation. You're going to go out and find out about it. It's going to be truths that will be rooted in experiment and quantitative behavior, but will very likely be abstract in many ways and that those conceptions about the world can be overturned by further investigation.

19:17 Mark: He seems to hold that even of his methods, that these are all provisional. This is some of the criticism that he received that he's just dictating this method. No, no, he's just based on what seems like it's going to be successful compared to previous methods. Here's some tools that I've come up with. That's the whole. What Organon means is a tool set. If they're not working quite properly, innovate, improve them. But even in doing observations, as you pointed out really early in this, Wes, if you assume that human senses and their observations can reveal to us in a ready way the underlying structures of things, that that's messed up like the microscope. We need an intellectual toolset to let us get beyond what ordinary observation reveals.

20:01 Dylan: Yes, well, it's the intellectual tool set that he's laying out in part in this first book at the end of page 11, this is 37 he's bringing up the skeptics here. Our method and that of the skeptics agree in some respect for setting out, but differ most widely and are completely opposed to each other in their conclusion. For they roundly assert that nothing can be known we that but a small part of nature can be known by the present method. Their next step, however, is to destroy the authority of the senses and understanding while we invent and supply them with assistance.

And then the next one, the idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding and are deeply rooted in it, not only so beset men's minds that they become difficult to access, but even when access is obtained will again meet and trouble us in the saturation of the sciences. Unless mankind, when forewarned, guard themselves with all possible care against them. That's the last aphorism before launching into these notions of the idols of our inquiry. That is all about how we fashion our way of thinking and interacting with the world ourselves so as not to get in our own way.

And to me, a way of characterizing his criticism of scholasticism and the syllogism and stuff is that we're getting in our own way about thinking about the world. We need to change our tool set about how we inquire about things. And in particular, we need to be conscious of what he calls the four idols.

21:34 Wes: So, yeah, let's run through those, because that for most listeners, probably the two associations they'll have with Bacon at the very least are the knowledge is power thesis, which we could discuss, as, you know, we'll discuss more of that and then the four idols.

21:49 Mark: So I didn't realize. I think it was in the Internet encyclopedia philosophy that idols is used here. It doesn't mean what it means when you're decrying a false religion. He uses the word idol from the Greek eidolon, image or phantom, not in the sense of a false God or heathen deity, but rather than in the sense employed in epicurean physics. Thus, a Baconian idol is a potential deception or source of misunderstanding, especially one that clouds or confuses our knowledge of external reality, which, when I think of like Twilight of the Idols or something, you know, obviously Nietzsche had in mind the religious sense.

It seemed like it's being claimed here that maybe the religious sense came second. Right. That eidolon just means, you know, something like false or, you know, deceptive. And then it was a later historical idea that that would be, you know, a false God in particular. I don't know if that's very useful. It just, it's. I'm sure Bacon had in mind false gods as well.

22:41 Wes: The idol is a substitute, Right. Whether we're talking about a false God or idol, in this sense, it's something that takes the place of the truer thing and so diverts us from it.

22:53 Mark: It takes the place of the whip. You give me the whip, I give you the idol.

22:56 Wes: Wait, is that a Indiana.

22:58 Dylan: Indiana. It's Indiana Jones thing?

22:59 Wes: Yeah.

23:00 Mark: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

23:01 Dylan: To me, that distinction between it being a false God and a distraction for the mind are almost indistinguishable. But if we want to go down that road later.

23:11 Mark: Nope, nope. Another day.

23:16 Wes: So idols of the tribe.

23:18 Dylan: The four of them are the idols of the tribe. The idols of the den, the idols of the market, and the idols of the. The.

23:25 Wes: Can we just use idols of the cave, since that's the usual translation than den?

23:30 Dylan: Yeah, cave is better. I like that better. You're right.

23:34 Wes: Yeah. We're reading a 1901 translation where. Which is pretty good, at least as far as I'm concerned. The best one we could find that didn't cost a lot of money, but it's a little flowery in places. And then it's just weird to see idols of the den instead of idols of the cave.

23:50 Dylan: Idola specus. Right. That's the Latin phrase.

23:53 Mark: So these are all things that are gonna make us grasp false generalizations, make us impose hypotheses as he's saying, or hastily constructed axioms on sensations.

24:07 Dylan: Yep.

24:07 Wes: So in the case of the tribe, which it's a little weird because he starts talking about idols of the tribe before he tells us, he'll list the four of them and what they are in general, and then he'll go into detail. So idols of the tribe having to do with human nature and our perceptions or constitution of the cave, having to do with individual dispositions and education. The market, which is largely about language and the way words deceive us, and then theater, the influence of philosophical dogmas. Then he'll launch into each one in detail. And so most of them he'll say, okay, so now let's do idols of the cave.

But with the tribe, he just launches into it and then tells us he's done that afterwards. So this actually is the longest. It's the one he concentrates on the most. It's funny because the way it starts out in 45, which is on page 13, he will basically say that we tend to suppose a greater degree of order in things than there is. And his example is the planetary orbits, which he rejects. Unfortunately, he can't win them all, so he misses that one.

25:16 Dylan: But he says that they can't possibly

25:20 Wes: be perfect circles, so maybe I'm being a little unfair.

25:23 Dylan: Perfect circles, yeah. He does clearly want to open the door for spiral and serpentine lines. So to me, he really wanted to say, well, look, the way you see that planet moving through the sky ought to be the way it's actually moving.

25:39 Wes: Yeah. So what we would see in the sky is it would move and then it would go backwards. We'd see these epicycles, and we can give a completely mathematically coherent description of the movement of the planets in terms of an apparatus which is geocentric and in which there are epicycles Ptolemy. So when we look at those phenomena, in the absence of further knowledge, we can give completely coherent theoretical explanations of what's going on that save the appearances, to use that phrase, and that are fully functional when it comes to their predictive power. So that's part of what he's pointing to here is just the fact that, yes, we can create these theories that work, but we haven't yet ruled out other theories that have just as much predictive power.

26:28 Dylan: So I find it really fascinating that he immediately goes to say, well, human beings, they look for patterns and can in fact, force peculiar kinds of simplicities. So it's a kind of virtue and a vice, which is, I think, why it's an idol, that if we're not careful, we can oversimplify what might be going on. Yeah.

26:49 Wes: And the next aphorism is basically the idea that we tend to ignore exceptions.

26:55 Dylan: Confirmation bias.

26:56 Wes: There you go. This is actually really interesting account of. You know, it touches on the psychology of it as well, which to me is actually really fascinating. It's more fascinating when it comes to political judgment, something I think a lot about. And confirmation bias is the phrase that we hear commonly today with respect to that and a lot of other cognitive errors.

27:22 Dylan: His argument against superstition, I think, is just really great. He gives this example. It is well answered by him who was shown in a temple the votive tablet suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwrecked, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognize the power of the gods by an inquiry. But where are those portraits of those who perished in spite of their vows? All superstition is much the same, whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or of the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common.

But this evil insinuates itself still more craftily in philosophy and the sciences, in which the settled maxim vitiates and governs every other circumstance, though the latter be much more worthy of confidence. It is a peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than negatives, whereas it ought duly and regularly to be impartial.

28:23 Mark: There's a little bit of debate if folks want to go back to our Karl Popper episode of to what extent Bacon's actually anticipating Popper's description of science as primarily looking for potential falsifications of negative instances. And he says right here, Bacon establishing any true Axiom, the negative instance is the most powerful. So even though Bacon doesn't have the actual language that we do today, like put out a hypothesis, try to falsify it with these tables and the way that he's approaching this, it seems like he's got something that is at least doing quite a bit of that job.

Right. It is not, as Bacon's critics say, just make observations, observations, observations, observations. And you'll never be done making observations. And you can't actually establish any generalities based on those observations if you're purely making observations. Clearly, Bacon thinks that it is possible to. There has to be some sort of. Maybe it's just not something that can be articulated so that, you know, a machine could do this. It has to be the skill of the experienced scientific observer that is looking at these prerogative instances, he's going to call them later, these places where something interesting seems to be going on, the pattern matching itself.

29:36 Dylan: Really.

29:37 Mark: Yeah. Whether it's like this is a weird, anomalous occurrence, we need to not just say it's a miracle, but like, how can we come up with the more general laws that govern ordinary things that would apply to this too. That's an example of one of his prerogatives. Or looking at how the different measures of something seem to affect the properties involved. There's like 27 of these things. So it seems like there's plenty of ideas provided for the intelligent scientific observer to then get going on a research program which will in effect identify all the potential negative instances. And then when those are ruled out, then whatever's left. That's your scientific theory. If you're acting what heat is. And as Wes gave the example, you've ruled out light, you've ruled out a million other things, like what seems to be the common thing.

30:32 Wes: What you're left with is the motion of particles and Bacon's opinion. Yeah, but he gets it right.

30:37 Dylan: I mean, I also can't help, especially when we brought up superstition, is thinking about the other ways socially, that superstition just runs roughshod over. And I don't know that Bacon himself was ever victim of that, but lots of people were. In fact, Kepler's mother was imprisoned as a witch and he spent a lot of time trying to fight against that. The power of both authority and the plainness of observation and that confirmation bias, which goes. I think Bacon's exactly right. It goes directly to how superstition works on people.

31:15 Wes: There's something in superstition which is pre scientific in a way, and that's what's so hard about this. It's the identification of correlation with causation. That's why there are a lot of interesting tensions in this. He's not just condemning generality, he's not just advocating observation. He's pointing out the limitations of both of those things, and he's pointing out why they have to be modified and then used in a way where they work together. But, yeah, if you're superstitious, you have the idea that there are these sort of causal relationships between things, some signs, means that something's going to happen, maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing.

And if you're only looking for the times that confirm it, that to you is your limited scientific experiment that confirms the principle. Once you start paying attention to exemptions, you can start moving beyond that and you move from the realm of simple surface correlation to deep structure, which is the place where we start to get real causation.

32:20 Dylan: This is a really important point, is that Bacon is in fact, a proponent of figuring out what the general rules of the world are, and he firmly believes that the world is knowable. He's not a skeptic and in fact is hard on skeptics in that respect. But it's the tool set, the way in which you go about doing so that matters, and that's what he's trying to articulate here.

32:46 Wes: So a good case in point Here is aphorism 50 on page 14, where he's going to get into the dullness of the senses as an impediment. If our contemplation of things, quote, unquote, ceases with sight, and we don't pay attention to what he calls invisible objects. We're not actually going to get anywhere. So we'll see. In the case of heat, he's going to have to postulate particles which are not themselves visible as a causal mechanism for heat. And it can't just be a matter of, hey, I'm observing it happening here. Here's light, here's heat. So heat is a kind of light, and even if I don't see the light, there's some light somewhere.

This sort of very rough association between qualitative things. By the way, Lucretius does this too, right? He's rejecting the idea that there are little homunculi, for instance, that are qualitatively similar on a microscopic level to the macroscopic thing that they're supposed to explain, or that blueness of an object is because there are little blue particles that make up the blue object. You explain Blueness, macro blueness, in terms of micro blueness. A very similar thing is going on here. We're not just looking for brute qualitative macro relations.

34:08 Mark: So there's a footnote here. Footnote 17. Bacon distinguished with the schools the gross and tangible parts of bodies from such as were volatile and intangible. These in conformity with the scholastic language he termed spirits. So there's this talk of spirits in things throughout here that, that to us is really glaring. Like, okay, something archaic is going on here. This footnote is clearly asking us to just say, yeah, it's just talking about whatever the structure is that is not directly discoverable by the senses or that

34:42 Wes: is not material particles. Right. So you could talk about gravity or the repulsive and attractive forces of particle physics. Those things themselves are not physical things in the sense of they're not material things that you can point to. They're structural, they're formal, and they're micro. So I think that's what spirits gets at too.

35:04 Mark: If you're going to insist that acknowledging a secret structure of things is an important part of scientific observation, why do you say secret? Because you can't discover them just by ordinary observation. You have to use the organon to get at them.

35:18 Wes: Well, he uses that where to the secret, the innermost secret chambers instead of staying in the antechamber, you know, we have to basically force our way into nature's bedroom. And it's very rapey, rapey language. But.

35:33 Mark: So my question is though, if you're going to posit something like that, you'd ideally want to do it in as assumption free way as possible. Like if you just said there's an inner structure of things, what it is exactly science is supposed to understand is supposed to investigate. I'm unclear here because I read in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry a little more about if he doesn't believe, if he's not an atomist, what does he actually think? And so this notion of spirits to him kind of goes all the way down that the problem he has with the idea of atoms in a void is really a problem of reason and not something you'd get off of just mere observation. It just seems like there's no motivating force for things. Why would things move at all if they were just atoms clunking around in a void? And I think Lucretia says that there's an initial motion that they've been moving since time.

36:23 Dylan: The swerve.

36:23 Mark: Yes. Okay, so if you're gonna allow yourself to theorize at this level, which Bacon does, like, you think that he might just want to stay at the surfaces of things, stay, you know, according to his own rules, what actually can produce tangible results. But he does allow himself to speculate. And because so these spirits do end up being something like what is explaining the swerve, he's not going to agree with Aristotle that just every kind of particle has its own thing that it likes to do. And fire likes to go up and earth likes to go down. Like, that's too simple.

But there are still, you know, as you get into this book, toward the end, he's talking about different types of motions. And there are just some types of substances that they just like to spin. They just, they're more comfortable when they're spinning. And there's some that just like to be more at rest. And there are some that are held in suspension, such as the heart, the beating heart of an organism. You know, it's trying to escape the bounds of its routine motion, but in fact is sucked back by forces like. And when he was considering that possibility, like that's kind of how we consider, you know, planets in orbit.

That's exactly what's going on, right? They're trying to escape orbit, but gravity is pulling them back. So it's like this constant Heraclitean balance of forces, this flux that's keeping them. But that's not what Bacon thought that everything was like that he really thought, as far as we can tell, there seem to be some things that just a planet's gonna spin.

37:55 Wes: But even in this paragraph, right, the one where he's talking about spirits, that the aphorism 50, you know, it's right after talking about spirits, it'll say change is vulgarly called alteration, but what it actually is, change in position of smallest particles. So he's giving very atomism sounding type explanations for macro phenomena. And then he moves on here to basically saying to get at this we need to do experiments. So he says again, the very nature of common air and all bodies of less density, of which there are many, is almost unknown, for the senses are weak and erring.

Nor can instruments be of great use in extending their sphere or acuteness. All the better interpretations of nature are worked out by instances and fit and apt experiments where the senses only judge of the experiment, the experiment of nature and the thing itself. We get this idea that we can't just observe things. We have to, you know, in an experiment, right, we might set up some kind of relation between a phenomenon and what's meant to measure it. And then the Object of our senses might become the dial on some measuring device.

39:10 Dylan: We extend our senses by instrumentation.

39:12 Mark: Yeah, he continues, right in the 51. The human understanding by his own nature is prone to abstraction and supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed. But it is better to dissect than abstract nature. Such was the method employed by the school of Democritus. So here he's actually saying something good about the atomists, which made greater progress in penetrating nature than the rest. It is best to consider matter its conformation, and the changes of that conformation, its own action and the law of this action or motion. For forms are a mere fiction of the human mind, unless you will call the laws of action by that name.

I know we're talking about the idols. I want to make sure we get to talking about what he means by forms and how that relates to the law of nature. You know, he's trying to say, here are things that distract us, you know, that make us too dogmatic. But it's really hard to say that without saying something that sounds a little dogmatic in response to the false thing.

40:04 Dylan: Right.

40:05 Mark: Here's an example of people who have been dogmatic. And it's not that they should chill out and make fewer generalizations. It's. No, I think there's a different generalization that's a little better.

40:14 Dylan: Well, he addresses this a bit in 49. He says the human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a tincture of the will and passions which generate their own system accordingly, for man always believes more readily that which he prefers. He therefore rejects difficulties for want of patience in investigation, sobriety, because it limits his hope, the depths of nature, from superstition, the light of experiment, from arrogance and. And pride, lest his mind should appear to be occupied with common and varying objects, paradoxes from a fear of the opinion of the vulgar. In short, his feelings imbue and corrupt his understanding in innumerable and sometimes imperceptible ways.

40:54 Wes: Yep, I really love that paragraph. I was reminded of Mill there and Mill listing all the different ways in which the passions corrupt reason. And he's going so far as to say that reason or human understanding is somehow made up of. Or it's not simply just influenced by the will and the passions, but it gets its part of its composition from them. And so we expect it to be undermined routinely by irrationality.

41:17 Dylan: And there's that flavor of all of our knowledge is contextual in the sense of it reflects back upon itself. And it says as much about the entity doing the thinking. As it does about the world.

41:30 Mark: But you just got to wonder what his purpose is in the saying this here. It seems like he's just setting up the idols. The way you're putting it, the way we're kind of. That makes it sound most profound, is by saying that there's a postmodern element to it, that even I, Bacon, in laying out my theories here, am going to be influenced by my passions. Do you think that humility that he's expressing here, or are you saying, hey, normal theorizing that humans will do without my organ on is going to be full of this stuff? So we really need an organon that will take things out of the hands of the passions.

42:06 Dylan: I think it's the former. I think that he is putting in this particular section, which is the idols of the tribe, which is all about how we are in our human nature and how our human nature affects the ways in which we understand the world. I think that's exactly why that's there. And I think that is a perfect example of a piece of very, very early modern philosophy and inquiry that belies the notion that the postmoderns figured out that science is embedded within human inquiry. It's a kind of caricature of science. In fact, from the very beginning, being a scientist meant understanding that we affected the ways of our own looking at the world, and we better be careful about that. We didn't need Quine or Popper to tell us that.