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

0:00 Mark: Let's move on to the second idol, the idols of the cave or the den, depending on your translation. Things idiosyncratic to individuals which would interfere with their applying correct scientific reasoning in all circumstances. So you might really be into some particular kind of theory. For instance, you've made a discovery in some area, you've gotten very excited about something, and you just apply it across the board and think that this is the foundation of nature. For instance, Nietzsche's will to power in that area, I should say Schopenhauer's will to power there, seeing that in an analysis of human relations and then just sort of imposing that on.

Yeah, that works for nature. Let's make that entire cosmology. And it's unclear whether he's really doing that as a serious scientific hypothesis, because Schopenhauer has that Kantian distinction between the world as it is in itself, which is what he's talking about with will versus the world as it appears to us, which is what science would investigate. But still, I can't help but see this as something that I want to apply to people quite often in the modern age.

1:04 Wes: This is the one which just sort of flows out of people's predominant pursuits and obsessions, the individual's mind and body,

1:11 Mark: but also from education, habit and accident.

1:14 Wes: So in 68 he'll give a summary of what he's just said and he'll tell us one of them is predominant pursuit. The other is excess of synthesis and analysis. Another one is party zeal for certain theories of certain ages. And another one is narrowness of subject. These all have to do with habit. I think ultimately in education, some people, for instance, will be more inclined to the synthetic than the analytic. But those are the four branches of this. And the synthetic and the analytic will turn out to be interesting because it's one of the places where, and this is aphorism 57, where he'll say that if you look too much at individual forms, you essentially weaken the understanding, you weaken your capacity for abstraction.

If you look at too much at generality, you get stupefied. You get into the habit of missing the details. And so you have to use both of these two species, he calls them, in succession, and you have to always be on the watch for getting lured into too much of one or the other. And one of the things that's important about that, other than this idea that you have to alternate paying attention to generalities and paying attention to particulars, is the fact that the idols aren't just necessarily these bad habits that we have because we're going to have to, as scientists, address generality and address particularity.

In other words, they're not just habits that have to be completely extirpated. They could just be an excess of something that is an inherent part of inquiry. So we can't really escape it, and we always have to be on the watch for it.

2:52 Dylan: Is it called the idol of the cave in reference to Plato's cave? Because that's what it seems like. We're constrained by our own individuality about what we look upon and understand about the world.

3:03 Wes: Well, in Plato's cave, it's think it's the world of becoming which distracts us from the real world of Platonic forms, the real metaphysical substance that underlies things.

3:15 Mark: I mean, clearly it would have to be a loose analogy if it was referencing that. But yeah, I would think the first idol about the tribe would be more applicable to, you know, it's just human nature. The idols of the den, which mostly owe their birth either to some predominant pursuit habits you've gotten in. In other words, idols of the home, the Cave, the Den things in your individual upbringing. That's why I actually think Den is a little better translation than Cave.

3:37 Wes: Yeah, it's character, ultimately, it's personality.

3:41 Mark: The idols of the market. The third one, the most troublesome of all those, namely, which have entwined themselves around the understanding from the association of words and names. This is 59. For men, imagine that their reason governs words, while in fact words react upon the understanding. This has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in a popular sense and define things by these broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind. But when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary those lines and to adapt them accurately to nature, words oppose it. There you go.

4:14 Wes: He's one of these English language philosophers. What do they call them? Ordinary language philosophers, the Oxfordians?

4:22 Mark: Actually, though the ordinary language philosophers are the latter generation. It's the Wittgensteinians, the logical positivists. Logical positivism itself is actually why Bacon was in disfavor in the early part of the 20th century. But if it sounds like we need to reform language such that it actually accurately reflects what's in the world, as opposed to these like, that sounds like what early Wittgenstein with the positivists tried to do. Maybe it's. The idea is that. No, ultimately we're recognizing that there's a discrepancy here, but the solution is not to come up with a perfect language, but just to acknowledge that language is going to be only approximate. We need to come up with specific, scientifically accurate definitions for scientific context.

5:05 Wes: I was being a little facetious. I'm not a fan of the idea that, for instance, philosophical problems are just reducible to the influence of language. So the idea that there's a substance attribute, ontology, or metaphysics that we're lured into because of nouns and adjectives, something like that. Because here he's really mainly talking about the concept of vagueness, which sounds pretty simple but is actually extraordinarily important. And you see this all the time. I've been thinking a lot about political discourse. So you see this all the time in the way people talk about politics.

They use these words that they're so vague that people talk past each other. They just mean different things or they're speaking so broadly. The concept of vagueness is actually really important. So he's calling for definitions, but he's saying they cannot remedy the evil in natural and material objects because they consist themselves of words. And these words produce others, so that we must necessarily have recourse to particular instances and their regular series and arrangement. As we shall mention, when we come to the mode and scheme of determining notions and axioms.

There's always something deficient in language because of the way that vagueness creeps in and the way that we can always create caveats and exceptions.

6:24 Dylan: What you're describing, I think, is a character of all the idols in that he's articulating things that we need to be conscious of, none of which will be able to escape. So the idols of the market, the force of our words, it's not as if we can escape this problem, but we can pay attention to it and we can refine its hold on us.

6:48 Mark: I'm not sure why exactly he uses the term market here other than just, you know, it's what people exchange. It's the common currency of people. But the violation of that. This in economics is just such a philosophically important and very prevalent issue that it just jumps out at me here that the whole idea of measuring the welfare of a state by its GDP or something like that, that is entirely something that is easily measurable. Let's ignore the thing that's less easily measurable. It's an example of the kind of abstraction that he's pointing to throughout this whole talk of idols.

7:24 Wes: He's going to say that there are two ways in which words confuse us. One is just the tendency to refer to things that don't actually even exist. And then the other one is the use of words that are ill defined. Planetary orbits, for instance, are fictions, or the element of fire is a more apt one. So people will refer to things which are just hasty abstractions. So they're essentially using words that don't refer because they've just been influenced by the existence of bad metaphysical theories.

7:54 Mark: Like consciousness, for instance.

7:56 Wes: Exactly.

7:59 Dylan: Regarding it being a market, the word that's used is fori. idola, fori. It's related to the word forum. It's a conjugation of that declension. It's a declension. Yeah. But to me, that makes me think of a place of discussion. Right. The way the agora was for the Greeks, the way the court of justice or a market square or the Roman forum. So in that way it doesn't seem to me to be necessarily economic.

8:27 Mark: Sure.

8:28 Dylan: Did we talk about how these idols work in two ways regarding naming things that don't have any existence versus abstracted and confused terms.

8:38 Wes: So, yeah, so the first one, like the element of Fire would be the naming something that doesn't exist. And then the second one is example, unfortunately, is the word moist

8:51 Dylan: of something that's confused.

8:53 Wes: Yeah, it can really refer to a lot of different types of things. So refer to moist desserts, something that is easily divided and dispersed, that which is easily united and collected and so on and so forth.

9:05 Dylan: Yeah, the word moist is nothing but a confused sign of different actions admitted, of no settled and defined uniformity. I guess the difference there is that it refers to something that exists, but it's so, as you said, vague and inspecific as to be. Be not really telling you anything.

9:20 Mark: So this seems to blend into the last one, which is the idols of the theater, which are those that are propounded by having bad philosophical theories at work. Bacon believed in the ether, but we would use the ether now as a good example of a theory that uses a term that doesn't actually refer to anything. So it looks like it's an alleged example of an idol of the market, something in language, but it's not really the word ether itself. You know, words only have meanings in the context of theories.

9:52 Dylan: That's an interesting example, Mark, because I would have pointed to it as an example of something that was pointed out as existing. And it was arrived at by kind of abstract thinking searching for causes that you needed to have. Something that was, in the case of the ether, something that if light was a wave, something has to be moving, something has to be waving in order for that to be happening, that light to be a wave at all. And it was in pursuit of that, saying, well, it's got to exist. How am I going to find it? And finding that it in fact doesn't exist, that contributed to the rethinking of how light actually behaves.

10:31 Mark: 67. The idols of the theater or of theories are numerous and may and perhaps will be still more so. For unless men's minds had been now occupied for many ages in religious and theological considerations, and civil governments, especially monarchies, had been averse to novelties of that nature, even in theory, there's no doubt that many other sects of philosophers and theorists would have been introduced, like those which formerly flourished in such diversified abundance among the Greeks. So, yeah, we don't want ideology to tamp down on certain directions of inquiry.

11:03 Dylan: And in fact, we want to develop a new tool just before that. Our method of discovering the sciences is such as to leave little to the acuteness and strength of wit, and indeed rather to level wit and intellect. For as in the drawing of a Straight line or accurate circle by the hand, much depends on its steadiness and practice. But if a ruler and compass be employed, there is little occasion for either. So it is with our method.

11:28 Wes: This is very English. It's not about great geniuses, it's about regular people with their compasses.

11:38 Mark: And the next section is talking about Aristotle. So this seems like a good time to kind of bring up how he can be so dismissive in so much of past philosophy, but yet say, hey, I acknowledge the genius of those ancient ages. It's just that they didn't have the tool. If I was operating without this tool set that I'm coming up with, without this new organon, I certainly don't have the genius to come up with the things that they came up with, you know, so I'm just not arguing with them on those terms at all. I think that's related to his attitude toward religion, which is not talked about in great detail here.

But clearly he wants to just draw a line, right? There's the book of Nature and there's the book of God. And what we're studying is the book of Nature. It's God's creation. In fact, it's our divine responsibility to be researching this. But we don't refer to the book of God when we're looking at the book of nature. We just, you know, look at nature the way it's supposed to be. You could ask, is he just kind of hedging his bets and covering himself in the way that all these really underlyingly atheistic philosophers are being? I don't think so.

I mean, he has this whole book called New Atlantis, this utopian novel where he has a picture of society enacting his method. And it's a very Christian society. And there's a definite discipline required in Christianity that is also required by the scientific method. There's something, as Nietzsche was very ready to point out later, something that is very self denying in constraining yourself to the scientific method.

13:11 Wes: This talk of Aristotle and 63 is where he really gets into it. So he's going to say there are three species of error for the idols of the theater. Once again, there's going to be the sophistic and the empiric and then the superstitious. And so we get this contrast once again between people who are too abstract and then people who are too empirical in their approach. For Aristotle, I think it's kind of an informative critique because it's the idea that there's a failure to reach, strangely enough, broader principles. So he says the imposed, innumerable arbitrary distinctions upon the nature things.

13:51 Dylan: You see this in Aristotle when you read his biology books, his books about the generation and corruption of animals and their lists and lists and lists of particulars.

14:03 Mark: But I felt like that, you know, in De Anima, which we read, you know, even though he's listing all these things, and Bacon is a little dismissive of just the endless categorization of things like that's not actually knowledge, it's just laying out a categorization. But it doesn't seem like it stops Aristotle from coming up with, oh, no, these very global metaphysical ways of interpreting these many, many different distinctions. Maybe it's just that he thinks that the intermediate axioms are missing from Aristotle too much, right? That you've got the four types of causes so you can talk about any individual in terms of that.

14:37 Wes: He may be thinking a lot more about Aristotelian scholasticism than Aristotle himself. At least that was one of the suggestions of either the footnotes or the secondary readings, which I got the impression he actually had greater respect for Aristotle than comes across in this. Nor is much stress to be laid on his frequent recourse to experiment in his books on animals, his problems and other treatises. For he had already decided, without having properly consulted experience as the basis of his decisions and axioms. And after having so decided, he drags experiment along as a captive, constrained to accommodate herself to his decisions, so that he is even more to be blamed than his modern followers of the scholastic school who have deserted her altogether.

15:24 Dylan: There's a funny thing in Aristotle where you have this proliferation of observations. It's certainly a consequence of standing on this side of someone like Bacon and looking back on Aristotle and the Greeks is you feel like, how could you not have just tried this out when you came to that conclusion? And the lack of vigorous experimentation. So they would go and observe. They would talk about, like buildings being built or examining animals behaving. But there wasn't the notion of evaluating the conclusion by coming up with some kind of circumstance that would test it.

And that just seems strange when you read it. It can only to me point to Bacon sort of being right, that there's a characteristic of the mode of inquiry that they just didn't think about it that way as much as they would observe. Someone like Aristotle would observe how the world worked. There wasn't the inclination to try to fabricate something with that knowledge.

16:27 Mark: So you don't think it's just because Aristotle is his students. LECTURE NOTES and it's not.

16:31 Dylan: It could Be people like Archimedes. They were using his mathematical work to build devices. So it's not like the notion of applying this knowledge to practical matters was absent.

16:46 Mark: Another thing is Bacon considered himself a political theorist. And some of that is this new Atlantis sort of having a vision of where science is becomes a prominent thing in society. And this will give rise to tolerance. And I was reading some of the secondary sources that were giving him credit for things that directly influence influential on Locke and thus on the US Constitution. But Bacon was also just political in a more straightforward sense and really thought that the scientific method was applicable to everything. He really was guilty of scientism in that, even though he has these things, oh yeah, there's the book of God and the book of nature and you know, so we can make a slicing point between the things that religion should properly treat of.

But once he's sort of gotten that out of the way, no, you should be able to use this stuff to talk about human behavior. It's not just about physics and chemistry. So he's even sort of doing that in outlining what these idols are. He's doing psychology and he thinks that that would be a perfectly legitimate bit of science.

17:51 Wes: It's unclear to me what he would say about that. Is there something in the reading or in the secondary literature that points us to that?

17:57 Mark: Yeah, it was just stuff that he said toward the beginning. I guess it's just knowledge and human power being synonymous. So anything that we can accomplish, I would like to have him here to talk more about. Social engineering is basically what I'm trying to get at is that if you can say stuff about human nature and thus construct a more effective government, like is that one of the roles that political science Is he saying political science is a thing here? Just in the very basis of saying this method is essentially unbounded.

18:29 Dylan: Why wouldn't you? I mean, are you thinking about some kind of eugenic or hardcore sciences running society kind of thing?

18:39 Mark: Yeah, I mean, it's just obvious that as Wes was saying about terms that we are using inconsistently in political contexts. And so it would just seem that, yeah, you might want to use the scientific method in political contexts, but that the idols would be much more present and dangerous than they are when you're just looking at the arcs of the planets or something like that. You know, something that is ostensibly objective when you're actually evaluating human systems and human nature. I would think that our preconceptions would be just all the more ripe. We'd have so many ulterior Motives in judging ourselves wrongly.

19:24 Dylan: Look at all the theories of racial distinction from the 1800s, right?

19:29 Mark: Yeah. There's no at least part of this book that's super racist. At least we don't have that to worry about in this Bacon text.

19:37 Wes: See, I was thinking more about in the realm of the political. It looks a lot more like Mill's conception of fallibility. And that's where Bacon's idea of the vagueness of terms fits right in. So speaking of race, I saw on an article not long ago, you know, people will say things like we all ought to agree that racism is wrong and so such and such is beyond the pale. And of course, what all that always leaves out is a definition of racism which has actually become a term of contention. And it can make that discussion, even itself a form of racism.

It can make that discussion taboo. That type of vagueness to political terms where you can condemn your opponents for holding this generically evil position because you fail to define it. I think political discussion is rife with that. And the fallibility comes in because at a certain level our terms are always too vague and they always need refinement. So strictly speaking, no matter how well intentioned our utterances, we're always uttering falsehoods when we talk in these vague terms. So we might say, give some sort of political platitude like murder is wrong.

But the real problem, the meat of the problem, is how do we define murder? What should be our effective response to that? How is it a case of moral outrage? How does due process ameliorate that? What's the distinction between that and manslaughter? What should the punishments be? Our ideas about things fit into this much larger network of beliefs and they're never perfectly situated to that larger network. In Mill's terms, that gives us a kind of position of radical fallibility where there's always some sort of error. If you think about our assertions, there's some sort of error.

And then scientific correlated to that is just that we can always refine. Right? Maxwell's equations are all well and good, but they have to be modified for relativity. And we assume that further refinements maybe not. But in science as a whole, we're always expecting further refinements and we're expecting that strictly speaking, our current theories are false. Again, strictly speaking, they're mainly true, they're usable and all that stuff. But when you get down to brass tacks and the very specific, there's something wrong with them. That's where I think the political applicability of this comes in because you can take this emphasis on revisability and experiment and fallibility, and you can successfully apply that politically, and you can do that in discourse, and you can also do it institutionally, where you're setting up a system of checks and balances, for instance, in a society.

22:28 Mark: Another political aspect of this was, just from what I understand, again from the secondary reading, was that he was in a situation where he really was engendered a great sense of techno optimism. The tradition that had been rediscovered by the Renaissance was kind of based in Homer. Things were really great a long time ago, and they just steadily go downhill. And you can just see that or other philosophical positions where just everything stays more or less the same. This sounds like the kind of criticism Bacon would make, that we see sameness where there really is changeability.

Bacon has a lot of talk in here about this. Is man conquering nature? It would be morally suspect for you to use a tool, an organon, to conquer your fellow man or to forward the interest of your particular social group. But when it's forwarding all human interests against just nature as force that is working to our demise, you know, it's the curse of Cain that we have to work for a living. No, we could use technology that's supposed to come directly out of science as a way of cleaning up original sin, right? The fruit of the tree of knowledge doesn't have to be something that damns us to labor.

We could use it to ease human suffering. And so that makes it sound like there should be limits to the amount of practical control, you know, we want to make. We want to live healthfully and safely. Do we want to go so far as engaging in social engineering? Do we want to go the Huxley route? It's certainly a question that will come up, but I think there's ammunition in Bacon to say no, part of our conquering nature would not be conquering ourselves in this profound way. And the sort of genetic assembly line engineering that we saw in Brave New World.

24:17 Wes: But I'm not sure it's on page 49, the aphorism 129, that he talks about, specifically about some of these inventions. Let anyone but consider the immense difference between men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the New Indies. And then he goes on to talk about printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and the state of the world. Whole world, first in literature, then in warfare, lastly in navigation. And innumerable changes have been thence derived so that no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.

And then I thought a little bit there on modern variants on these, like the Internet and obviously nuclear weapons, but also rocket science and gps. The thing that he'll address after this is just the possibility that the sort of thing we hear today, which is that, well, technology, we got to look at the ways in which it's made the world worse. And it's even a hint here, you know, in terms of gunpowder. And he'll talk about the various ambitions and the misuse of technology. But he'll say at the end of this section, let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and science is becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like.

For the same can be said of every worldly good. Talent, courage, strength, beauty, et cetera. He's just at the start of something. He can't imagine how much leverage over nature we're going to get, how far into her bedroom and her secrets we are actually going to penetrate. I wonder if he knew the enormous leverage we had, the enormous power that we would gain through the science, if he would feel the same way.

26:05 Mark: Yeah, I feel like that's why his vision of the techno utopia is with a very stern Christian morality, giving everybody discipline and thoughtfulness and humanity. We would need that to maybe not guide the progress of science, you know, in terms of certainly guiding its application.

26:24 Dylan: The end of what Wes was quoting from only let mankind regain their rights over nature assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.

26:38 Mark: So it seems like we should look a little more at the actual mechanisms. Like, do we want to talk about what's in book two at all?

26:48 Dylan: We've talked about it a little bit already.

26:50 Mark: We forgot about forms. So, yeah, we should really clear that up, because ultimately what he's going to be doing here is examining what the forms of things are and what he means by forms are. As we quoted before, laws of action. Right. Forms in the Aristotelian sense are fiction.

27:08 Dylan: I think we can just look at the first aphorism. To generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures upon a given body is the labor and aim of human power. While to discover the form or true difference of a given nature, or the nature to which such nature is owing, or source from which it emanates, is the labor and discovery of human knowledge.

27:29 Mark: So the form is the source from which something emanates.

27:32 Dylan: Under the first must be ranked the transformation of concrete bodies from one to another, which is possible within certain limits. Under the second, the discovery in every species of generation and motion of the latent and uninterrupted processes from the manifest efficient and manifest subject matter up to the given form.

27:50 Wes: So we're talking about emergence, right on lower level motion.

27:56 Dylan: Well, that's really interesting because I think that that's sort of what you get out of his conclusion about heat, that heat is an emergent property of the motion of particles because heat doesn't actually exist in his final conclusion. But at the very least, he's tying things to cause. So in the second one true knowledge is that which is deduced from causes. So the beginning here of the second book is going to instantiate the process of finding the form by tracing the causes. So in some ways it's an efficient form.

28:31 Mark: Page 25 forms the true differences of things which are in fact, the laws of simple action. So that makes it sound like in that case, form is not emergent necessarily. It could just be the simple action of things.

28:46 Wes: I think he's using form in a different sense in that section one, so I don't think we should get confused there. Yes, when we're using form, technically we mean laws of nature. And it's in aphorism 2 where he goes through all the different kinds of causes, efficient and final and all that. I think we might expect as readers for him to come down on the side of efficient cause and say, hey, this is where science is. Because that's what we think of as typical cause and effect. Billiard ball hitting another. It's the efficient cause of the motion of the other.

Or the. I guess the house builder is the efficient cause of the house in Aristotelian terms. And he's going to reject that sort of thing as desultory and superficial. And that's because he's looking for not just efficient causes, but larger regularities. And those are the laws of nature. And that's the type of form that he's interested in.

29:38 Dylan: There are hints later on in this one of conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, that kind of thinking as being a form that you would. You'd be pointing to as a law

29:49 Mark: of nature within section 2 here. For although nothing exists in nature except individual bodies exhibiting clear individual effects according to particular laws, yet in each branch of learning, that very law, its investigation, discovery and development are the foundation of both of theory and practice. This law, therefore, and its parallel in each science is what we understand by the term form. So it's not quite like the law of nature because that term introduces philosophical problems in itself, right? Is it? That's sort of derived from God saying this is what nature will do and somehow things just obey that.

And the way that we use it now seems to be just like really high level generalizations. In other words, like. Like the axioms. And that's sort of what he's talking about, but I think he means a little stronger and a little more. What Aristotle means by form is what makes the thing what it is, its essence, really. Right. The actual differences between things, the forms.

30:49 Wes: So let's just reread that. Nothing exists in nature except individual bodies exhibiting clear individual effects according to particular laws. Which sounds a lot like to me like a. The substance of a laws of nature type view, materialistic view and deterministic view and an emergentist point of view where there are lots of places in the text that should suggest it, where we're going to get reductions to. Despite the bad things he has to say about atomism, when we really get into the meat of things, we're going to be getting at what he calls the invisible elements.

So you could call those spirits. But. But really I think it's about the movement of bodies at a level is not necessarily susceptible to direct observation. And so when we talk about what something is and what its nature is, the way we think about that today. So an Aristotelian might think that there's just this brute final formal reason that makes something what it is. Right? It has an end, it has a telos and it has activity in that direction. And that's it. There's no reduction to hey, it's a bunch of swirling atoms and molecules and they operate according to these laws.

And then you can look at the next level up and that operates according to those laws which in the one is reducible to some extent to the other. Actually, reducibility doesn't work. But we'll leave that aside. They're related to each other. That's our alternative view that I think we're more prone to today. Which is to say, no, it's not about these brute formal reasons that make an entity what it is. At the macro level we get this reduction of a sort and it has to do, interestingly enough, with matter in motion. That's a really interesting and radical idea.

I don't think the Aristotelian final cause view makes the essence of an entity fundamentally related to some level where things are just operating according to laws concerning matter in motion.

32:55 Mark: Can you retain something of notion of forms, but getting rid of the teleology so that the form of an acorn is the tree. For Aristotle, it is the thing that it is striving to go toward and will do so unless you know, it doesn't get enough nourishment or stopped in some other way. But he's saying right at the beginning here of book two, to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures upon a given body is the labor and aim of human power. While to discover the form or true difference of a given nature or the nature to which such a nature is owing or source from which it emanates.

For these terms, approach nearest to an explanation of our meaning is the labor and discovery of human knowledge. So human knowledge and power are basically the same thing. I think a lot of his contemporaries were engaged in alchemy, and that's what this looks like. To generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures upon a given body. How can I show my scientific prowess other than by turning lead into gold? And that would make me. I would have to understand what lead is and what gold is and how change in substance occurs. And that is to understand the basic laws, the forms involved.

And maybe just like it's a little arbitrary for us to say, like, how many scientific laws are there? Maybe in the same way it would be for him to say how many forms are actually involved. Like, that's getting too Aristotelian, that he's just using form and natural law in general as a way of just talking about also nature. It's not like how many natures are involved here. No, it's just these are ways of talking about the way things are and the way that they change.

34:33 Wes: Yeah, this gives us a reason for believing in experimentation. Right. Because the one thing, and I'll say this in one of the aphorisms, is we can move things or we can cause things. You know, the one thing we know we can do is to rearrange bodies, make them interact. In fact, that's what he says is the only thing that we can do. And if we know that ultimately we have laws regarding motion at work here, you know, at some other level, then we can expect that, as I've put it, poking at nature will tell us what it is. If it weren't the case, if motion and matter weren't actually an essential part of this, I'm not sure that you'd have any reason to believe that experimentation in the sense of Setting up situations where you do things to.

You put something under a Bunsen burner, for instance, whether you're trying to make something happen and that's going to tell me what it is, or it's going to get me partway there. You wouldn't have a good reason to believe that if it weren't for this other picture. I don't know. Am I wrong about that?

35:37 Dylan: It sounds right, because it's a manifestation of knowledge is power. In this case, that power is demonstrating that, you know, how nature is working means that you can do an experiment that manifests that behavior. The way you put it, you can prod nature to do the thing that you think it can do. You can set up the plain example of whatever it is that you think happens in nature. So you can, in your case, your Bunsen burner, the more powerful your knowledge, the more you'll be able to refine what the effects are from the causes. And so you know, you have some substance that you then through titration, you distill out its parts. And so now you have water in one jug and alcohol in the other jug because you know that alcohol boils at a different temperature than water does, and so you distill out the alcohol.

36:30 Mark: So the way he actually presents this in book two, starting in section 11, is there's five tables. He's using heat as the examples here. And this is just when it got. I was starting this as an audiobook and I'm like, oh, it's still going, what the hell? What the hell is going on here? But like, when you see it in a table form, you're just like, oh, okay, I can kind of skim over this and get the idea of what kind of stuff is listed here. So the first table is natural warm

36:57 Wes: baths, warm or heated liquids.

36:59 Dylan: Mark, just before you go that just these three tables are set up in terms of the senses in memory and in mind in aphorism 10, he's going to prepare as a foundation of the whole. You know, don't imagine or invent, but discover acts and properties of nature. So he's going to have a table like that, and the next one he's going to have a table of things to aid the memory in what things are related to one another. And then in the last one, he's going to be trying to reach for true and legitimate induction.

37:28 Mark: I don't think that's what they are setting down.

37:31 Dylan: You don't think.

37:31 Mark: So I was a little confused here. So 10 that you're quoting here, because I Didn't actually know what to make of that distinction. Here, the signs for the interpretation of nature comprehend two divisions. The first regards the eliciting or creating of axioms from experiment. The second, the deducing or driving of new experiments from axioms. The first admits. So in other words, the eliciting, the creation of axioms for experiment. Three divisions into ministrations, the senses, the memory, the mind or reason. For first we must prepare as a foundation for the whole, a complete and accurate natural and experimental history.

We must not imagine or invent, but discover the acts of properties of nature. So this is what I think the tables are doing. The tables are not saying, first I'm going to minister to your senses, then to your memory, then to your reason. He's providing a complete and accurate natural experimental history insofar as it's relevant to this particular subject matter. So the first table is instances agreeing in the form of heat. So it's here's like all the hot stuff I can think of, including not just ignited solids and the rays of the sun, particularly in summer, but green and moist vegetable matter combined and rubbed together as roses, peas in baskets.

So hay, if it be damp when stacked, often catches fire. Horse dung, strong and well rectified. Spirits of wine exhibit the same effect, so that the whites of eggs, when thrown into it, grows hard and white, etc. Other instances, you know, so he's got 27 things. Even a severe and intense cold produces the sensation of burning. Just all the places where we think we see heat, we are wont to call this a table of existence and presence. The second table seems to be where the actual science starts. Proximate instances wanting the nature of heat. That's the kind of stuff, as Wes was pointing out at the beginning, where it seems like light gives us heat.

But the first one, the rays of the moon, stars and comets, are not to be found to be warm to the touch. Nay, the severest cold had been observed to take place at the full of the moon.

39:24 Dylan: You say it's actual science in the sense that there are distinctions being made rather than there being a listing of observations.

39:31 Mark: Well, it is observations, but then it actually as part of this, like by page 60, let it be tried in common. Like it's recommending experiments to clear these up. Yeah, because there's nothing about the first table of just like, here's stuff that seems hot. How do you do an experiment? Is it really hot? Like, no, it's only when you're trying to exclude stuff, which is what the second it's not even a table. It's just a big long mass of text that goes on for pages and pages and pages.

40:00 Dylan: I just only want to quibble about the whole thing is science. You can't do the second table without the first.

40:07 Wes: Right?

40:07 Dylan: I guess the first part is all about observations of things that happen, gathering your stuff together that are like the thing you want to know more about. When you want to know what heat is, you're just going to go look at all the manifestations of it, and then there's refinement going on in the second one. And I agree with you that the activity of science is happening manifestly in what he's doing in the second one. But it's not like the first one isn't part of the project.

40:32 Wes: The other aspect of the first one that's important because he brings this up as part of his method, is just not taking one example and saying, hey, this is the paradigmatic example. Fire. Let me think about what generalizations I can draw from that. But to really spread your net wide and take in as broad a range of phenomena as possible. So you don't just get obvious examples or you get insulation, for instance, you know, from wool.

41:00 Mark: This looks very much like the same kind of thing we're doing just in philosophy when trying to figure out the definition of something. And I usually would bring this up in the context of showing why this kind of definition doesn't make any sense. But the idea of like, what is a chair? So asking what is heat really is just like asking, you know, what is justice and what is a chair? Is the mundane example that, well, let's think about borderline cases. Is a chair made out of a rock that you're sitting on that's sort of chair shaped? Is that really a chair?

So you start by just listing all the stuff that could possibly be heat. And then you start being a little more analytical about it and like, no, no. Is that really heat? And then try to figure out by just these one off, it's not that you need to have the definition first and then by a syllogism apply, like, does the rock count as a chair? No, it's. These are natural concepts. So it's not just a matter of what we decide. We're trying to really drill into them. And it could be that heat would just fall apart, that it'll be that this was one of the idols of the market.

And it's actually, there's not one thing that's heat. What we actually refer to as heat is a sensation. And that could actually be caused by pain. So this example on the first table of cold that is so intense that it seems to burn you, that's going to be something that I think, as we go through the process, that will be ruled out that that's not really heat. In fact, we're not talking about the sensation of heat at all. We're talking about a primary quality that's happening in matter. That's what we have to care about in our revised definition.

So third table is number four. In the vegetable world, we know of no plant nor part of any plant that is warm to man's touch. Yet, as we before observed, green weeds grow warm when confined, and some vegetables are warm and others cold to our internal touch. These are all quite confusing. Manures have some disposition toward heat. Let further inquiry be made as to the comparative heat in different parts of the limbs of the same animal for milk, blood, seeds and eggs are moderately warm and less hot than the outward flesh of the animal when in motion or agitated.

The degree of heat of the brain, stomach, heart and the rest has not been equally well investigated.

43:05 Wes: There seems to be borderline cases here, but also cases that are just comparative. So animals become more warm by motion and exercise, and the more motion they do, the warmer they get. If they're just doing it a little bit, they may be a tiny bit warm. You know, there are hints here of what you might do in experiments. Right. You know, at some point you might set up a mechanism that measures heat, let's say, or it measures temperature and vary some phenomenon. Yeah. Something that quantifies and then look at how the mechanism responds to that variation. So you get hints of that here. But mainly he just wants to look at the relationship between different degrees of heat and different degrees of something else that's happening, I think.

43:53 Mark: Yep. This will teach us more about the mechanisms. So in the fourth table, the exclusive table of rejection of nature from the forms of heat, which. This is kind of the first part of the actual conclusion here. On account of the sun's rays reject elementary or terrestrial nature. In other words, it's not that the earth is the thing that creates heat because it comes from the sun. And all these are like reject rarity,

44:15 Wes: reject rays of the moon and other heavenly bodies. Because of them, you can reject flame or light. So in other words, the moon doesn't warm us, it gives off light. So we know we can't just say that anything gives off light, produces heat.

44:30 Dylan: My favorite one is the last one. On account of the heat excited by friction reject principle Nature, by which we mean that which exists positively and is not caused by a preceding nature. So, right in that one, he rejects notion that heat is the substance itself.

44:49 Wes: Right?

44:49 Mark: Yeah. Fire the element. Yep. None of the above natures are of the form of heat, and man is freed from them all in the operation upon heat in the exclusive table are laid the foundations of true induction, which is not, however, completed until the affirmative be attained.

45:04 Dylan: This is why I was thinking of the last table as being associated with mind. But I might be wrong about that.

45:09 Wes: Dylan is wrong yet about.

45:11 Mark: Okay, I just didn't understand that sentence.

45:14 Wes: Maybe we should just stop to say that what he means by induction here, because that's another word with which Bacon is associated, is not what many of us might think on first blush is induction. You know, it's not. Oh, I see. Here's one white swan. Here's another. And then I come up with the idea that all swans are white. He has something very specific in mind that is completely against that idea of induction. So we need all these exceptions and gradations and the different phenomena. So there has to be this element of the experimental.

45:50 Mark: Yeah. So after we've done all this, excluding the. What's left. It's the first vintage form of heat, which again, is not a table. It's just a lot of text and it's kind of the correct theory. Right. Constant motion in warm and boiling liquids. If we look at our first table, we see there's a lot of motion involved. What we have said with regard to motion must be thus understood when taken as the genus of heat. It must not be thought that heat generates motion or motion heat, though in some respects this may be true, but that the very essence of heat or the substantial self of heat is motion and nothing else, limited, however, by certain differences.

46:27 Dylan: I want to read it again because it's both Maxwell and Aristotle at the same time.

46:33 Mark: Well, you're going to have to explain that chain to us if you want us to understand that.

46:37 Dylan: So Maxwell is one of the people who formulates the kinetic theory of heat. It must not be thought that heat generates motion or motion heat, but that the very essence of heat or the substantial self of heat is motion and nothing else. So the first two things are saying is not that heat is transformed from motion or that motion is transformed from heat. In particular, that heat is its own thing, but that motion itself is heat. That's right there. The kinetic theory of heat.

47:09 Wes: Well, we would say today, right, that the temperature of something is the average kinetic energy of its molecules. And Then that heat has something to do with two things of a different temperature coming into contact and then the kinetic energy getting dispersed between them. Something like that. Or they're averaging out. Heat is the energy transfer.

47:30 Dylan: I'm balking at the transfer part because you're right. You would take the temperature of something to quantify what you mean by the heat of it, but the heat is embodied in the motion of the particles.

47:44 Wes: Oh, I was thinking that temperature and heat are distinct and that we would say the temperature is measured by the kinetic energy of the particles, and then the heat always has something to do with energy transfer.

47:56 Mark: So Bacon specifically says that heat is not the heating, so.

48:01 Wes: Yeah, I know Bacon. Yeah. We're trying to give the modern. The contemporary theory.

48:05 Mark: Isn't that an ambiguity which I feel like we just touched on in some recent discussion of. Is it a dispositional account? In other words, when you're saying something is hot, are you saying it is of the sort that will cause, you know, a measuring instrument, it will transfer heat. In other words, you're defining in terms of its heating capacity as opposed to its intrinsic nature.

48:28 Dylan: If you're making the qualitative claim that it's hot, that's what you're saying. Sure.

48:33 Mark: Which one?

48:33 Dylan: That it has the ability to get something else hot.

48:36 Mark: But that's not the essence of what heat is.

48:39 Dylan: No.

48:40 Mark: Anyway, according to Bacon, let's just put aside what discussion did we just have this. I feel we just. Oh, it was in the philosophy of mind discussion in the context of Armstrong or something, of talking about functions as dispositions or as intrinsic qualities. But in any case, Bacon really does not see this as a problem and thinks that we can talk about intrinsic qualities, no problem, even though we can only tell about them, obviously, from how they affect other things, including our own sense organs. So I'm sure if we got into the details of.

Even if he's right on the money, in terms of the basic intrinsic definition of heat, there is stuff that sounds, as you get into the details, more like Aristotle, section two of this. He is an expansive motion tending towards the exterior, but at the same time bearing the body upward. There is no doubt that there may be many compound motions, as an arrow or dart, for instance, has a rotary and progressive motion. In the same way, the motion of heat is both expansive and tending upward. It seems like he doesn't have an explanation of why it goes up, up.

He's just saying it's part of the nature of heat, that it is an expansive type of motion. And at the end of this book, in fact, he has a really long section of all the types of motion which I was trying to point out why that was a problematic. By saying that, oh, some things just like to rotate, like here he seems to retain a little of that teleological Aristotelian talk that heat just likes to go up.

50:05 Wes: Can we assimilate some of this to entropy though? Like to bodies of different temperatures are in contact and we need to know why. There's going to be kinetic energy transfer between them. What if they're just little contained bubbles? Why should one spread to the other? That expansiveness is important going up. I don't know about going up, but.

50:25 Mark: But if something is moving around like you're right, unless there is a hard shell that would contain it, you know, in its own jittery nature, which is a certain kind of movement. As I was saying before of like that's how he thinks the heart is. It's. The heart doesn't just say, just explode out of the body, but it has countervailing forces upon it that would. So heat doesn't have that. It will tend to spread until it runs into a barrier. I don't have anything more intelligent to say about this analysis other than there are certain things that still look Aristotelian to me in it. And I'm sure. But Dylan, did you have anything worthy of mention here that you noticed in going through this?

51:00 Dylan: I think we got to it.

51:01 Wes: I can't remember from the secondary literature we read whether is this historically new? Is he just repeating something that's already sort of in the air with this theory? Because of course it is pretty amazing to derive this idea just from his tables. The way he's done it, it's roughly correct.

51:20 Dylan: You're wondering a little bit how well the tables are working or how much is he really subject to the idol of the market in this case?

51:30 Wes: Yeah, exactly. This could be in the Zeitgeist. And this could be a sort of after the fact rationalization of it.

51:37 Mark: I don't see in the first paragraph of the description of Bacon in the literature he invented the modern theory of heat. So I gotta think that this is just an illustration that was in the air.

51:47 Wes: Probably Right.

51:48 Mark: So the rest of the book I just want to read a little to page 77, section 21. After our tables of first review, our rejection or exclusive table and the first vintage derived from them, we must advance the remaining helps of the understanding with regard to the interpretation of nature and a true and perfect induction. An offering which we will take the Examples of cold and heat where tables are necessary, but where fewer instances are required, we'll go through a variety of others. So he talks about color, he's going to talk about motion, etc.

In the first place, this is like the rest of the book in the first place. Therefore, we will treat a prerogative instances. The whole rest of this is about this prerogative nature which I see in a footnote here. It says by this term Bacon understands general phenomena taken in order from the great mass of indiscriminate facts which, as they lie in nature, are apt to generate confusion by their number, indistinctness or complication subclasses of phenomena as being peculiarly subjective of causation. He quaintly classes under the title of prerogative inquiries.

And the guy has an example of why he would use that particular term that we don't have to care about. So, yeah, that's almost the entire rest of the book is laying out, I believe, 27. Something like that. I know we were supposed to skip in our official reading to the very end, which is where he just lists them all again.

53:03 Wes: You read all of them?

53:06 Mark: I listened to it all on some of it not paying particularly well attention. On fast 1.5 or double speed, page 136, section 52 of book 2. The prerogative instances are as appeared from what is preceded 27 in number. Solitary instances, migrating instances, conspicuous instances, clandestine instances. I'm not going to read them all, but they have cool names. Instances of the gate, instances of the road lancing instances, instances of rod wrestling instances, and lastly, magical instances. Instances by which he means like a small effect produces a large physical change. So like if you showed elementary chemical experiments to somebody and actually seemed to change one element in another, like, that would seem pretty damn magical. That's all he means by that.

54:01 Dylan: Magic is just another name for science. It's just science. That is impressive.

54:06 Wes: Yep. Science plus ignorance. Meaning I don't know why that happened.

54:12 Dylan: Well, yeah, I suppose that's true. What's funny to me about magic is when people talk about it is there's always a method to magic. You can always go learn it or it always affects the rest of the world.

54:25 Wes: Yep.

54:26 Mark: So the very last paragraph of the entire book here again, out of these 27 instances, some must be collected immediately without waiting for a particular investigation of properties. Skipping down the remainder are to be collected when we finish our synoptical tables for the work of the interpreter upon any particular nature. For these instances honored and gifted with such Prerogatives are like the soul amid the vulgar crowd of instances. A few of them are worth a multitude of others. All these just prerogative are things that will help us put the tables together, basically, for man by the fall lost at once his state of innocence and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life.

The first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the divine decree, in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread. She is compelled by our labors, not assuredly by our disputes or magical ceremonies, at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread, that is to say, to supply man's daily wants. There you go. God is okay with this book, but

55:31 Wes: will not be okay with its effects.

55:34 Mark: And I didn't read anything saying, oh, yeah, and a lot of philosophers accused him of being an atheist, which they say about everybody from this time period that we read.

55:44 Wes: Yep.

55:45 Mark: So he either believed it or he's pretty damn skilled in making this rationalization here.

55:49 Wes: Or the section on Heat was just too hard to get through and no one had the chance to accuse him.

55:58 Mark: We can't forget that this book, which is not that long in full, was supposed to be just a small part of a much longer programmatic work of which what, only two parts of the several planned intended six parts were ever completed. The instauratio.

56:15 Dylan: Yeah, the Great Instauration.

56:17 Mark: What is the instauration? What does that even mean?

56:21 Dylan: He refers to it earlier in this book. He uses that word, and he's referring to the new way of thinking, the new way of investigating the world, the new power.

56:32 Wes: It's a renewal of some sort, the

56:35 Mark: action of restoring or renewing something.

56:37 Wes: I think there's a vaguely religious reference to that. Is it what we lost from the Fall that we're getting back?

56:45 Mark: Well, that makes sense in this context, what I just read. Yeah, so he's super pretentious. Just that rubs against the image we have of Baconian science, is very workmanlike and humble, and it is in some ways. But yeah, he can't resist, at least in outlining what he's trying to do, in getting all grandiose about it, even as he is criticizing others. Impetuous grandiosity.

57:11 Dylan: I read a bit about his own biography, and he spent much of his life trying to become a member of the court, eventually became a member of the court under James. And one thing I read is that, you know, when he was at his height of power and influence. He also was incredibly gratuitous and flamboyant in his own lifestyle. Regarding his riches and his privileges, he probably was a bit insufferable.

57:38 Mark: All right, next time we're going to talk about social construction, we're going to read the first two chapters of Ian Hacking's book, the Social Construction of what we're going to read something by Peter Berger called Religion and World Construction, which is the first chapter of his book of the Sacred Canopy. And we're going to look at the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy article, Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction. Folks should let us know what they thought of this. What else we should cover partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment on the blog post associated with this episode.

You can go to our Facebook group or Facebook page and make comments there. You can tweet at us or email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com our closing song is Stuck in a Cave, connecting to Bacon's concept, the Idols of the Cave. It is by a band called Chrome Cranks. I interviewed their singer, Peter Aaron for Nakedly Examined Music Episode 93. Check it out at nakedly examined music.com thanks so much. Good night everybody.

58:47 Dylan: Sam.

59:08 Mark: Random.

59:34 Dylan: Win.

59:59 Wes: Sam.

1:00:25 Mark: It.