Ministry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №1 Course paper Theme: Francis Bacon The Man who perfected the English essays

I.2 The classification of the sciences.

Book II of the Advancement of Learning and Books II to IX of the De Augmentis Scientiarum contain an unprecedentedly thorough and detailed systematization of the whole range of human knowledge. Bacon begins with a distinction of three faculties—memory, imagination, and reason—to which are respectively assigned history, “poesy,” and philosophy. History has an inclusive sense and means all knowledge of singular, individual matters of fact. “Poesy” is “feigned history” and not taken to be cognitive at all and so really irrelevant. After subdividing poesy perfunctorily into narrative, representative (or dramatic), and allusive (or parabolical) forms, Bacon gives it no further consideration. History is divided into natural and civil, the civil category also including ecclesiastical and literary history (which for Bacon is really the history of ideas). History supplies the raw material for philosophy, in other words for the general knowledge that is inductively derived from it. Although Bacon proclaims the universal applicability of induction, he himself treats it almost exclusively as a means to natural knowledge and ignores its civil (or social) application.Two further general distinctions should be mentioned. The first is between the divine and the secular. Most divine knowledge must come from revelation, and reason has nothing to do with it. There is such a thing as divine philosophy (what was later called rational, or natural, theology), but its sole task and competence is to prove that there is a God. The second, more pervasive distinction is between theoretical and practical disciplines, that is, between sciences proper and technologies, or “arts.”Bacon acknowledges something he calls first philosophy, which is secular but not confined to nature or to society. It is concerned with the principles, such as they are, that are common to all the sciences. Natural philosophy divides into natural science as theory on the one hand and the practical discipline of applying natural science’s findings to “the relief of man’s estate” on the other, which he misleadingly describes as natural magic. The former is “the inquisition of causes,” the latter, “the production of effects.”To subdivide still further, natural science is made up of physics and metaphysics, as Bacon understands it. Physics, in his interpretation, is the science of observable correlations; metaphysics is the more theoretical science of the underlying structural factors that explains observable regularities. Each has its practical, or technological, partner; that of physics is mechanics, that of metaphysics, natural magic. It is to the latter that one must look for the real transformation of the human condition through scientific progress. Mechanics is just levers and pulleys.Mathematics is seen by Bacon as an auxiliary to natural science. Many subsequent philosophers of science would agree, understanding it to be a logical means of expressing the content of scientific propositions or of extracting part of that content. But Bacon is not clear about how mathematics was to be of service to science and does not realize that the Galilean physics developing in his own lifetime was entirely mathematical in form. Although one of his three inductive tables is concerned with correlated variations in degree (while the others concern likenesses and differences in kind), he really has no conception of the role, already established in science, of exact numerical measurement.Bacon is fairly cursory about “human philosophy.” Four somewhat quaint sciences of body are sketched—medicine, cosmetic, athletic, and “the voluptuary arts.” The sciences of mind—logic and ethics—are practical, consisting of sets of rules for the correct management of reasoning or conduct, with no suggested theoretical counterpart. Bacon is unreflectively conventional about moral truth, content to rely on the deliverances of the long historical sequence of moralists, undisturbed by their disagreements with one another.Bacon represents civil philosophy in the same uninquiringly practical way. It comprises not only the art of government but also “conversation,” or the art of persuasion, and “negotiation,” or prudence, the topic of proverbs and, to a considerable extent, of his own Essayes.In principle, Bacon is committed to the view that human beings and society are as well fitted for inductive, and, in 20th-century terms, scientific study as the natural world. Yet he depicts human and social studies as the field of nothing more refined than common sense. It was, of course, an achievement to extricate them from religion, and to do so without unnecessary provocation. But in his conception they remain practical arts with no sustaining body of scientific theory to ratify them. It was left to Thomas Hobbes, for a time Bacon’s amanuensis, to develop complete systems of human and social science. Bacon’s practice, however, was better than his program. In his writings on history and law he went beyond the commonplaces of chronicle and precedent and engaged in explanation and theory. The core of Bacon’s philosophy of science is the account of inductive reasoning given in Book II of Novum Organum. The defect of all previous systems of beliefs about nature, he argued, lay in the inadequate treatment of the general propositions from which the deductions were made. Either they were the result of precipitate generalization from one or two cases, or they were uncritically assumed to be self-evident on the basis of their familiarity and general acceptance. In order to avoid hasty generalization Bacon urges a technique of “gradual ascent,” that is, the patient accumulation of well-founded generalizations of steadily increasing degrees of generality. This method would have the beneficial effect of loosening the hold on men’s minds of ill-constructed everyday concepts that obliterate important differences and fail to register important similarities.The crucial point, Bacon realized, is that induction must work by elimination not, as it does in common life and the defective scientific tradition, by simple enumeration. Thus he stressed “the greater force of the negative instance”—the fact that while “all A are B” is only very weakly confirmed by “this A is B,” it is shown conclusively to be false by “this A is not B.” He devised tables, or formal devices for the presentation of singular pieces of evidence, in order to facilitate the rapid discovery of false generalizations. What survives this eliminative screening, Bacon assumes, may be taken to be true.Bacon presents tables of presence, of absence, and of degree. Tables of presence contain a collection of cases in which one specified property is found. They are then compared to each other to see what other properties are always present. Any property not present in just one case in such a collection cannot be a necessary condition of the property being investigated. Second, there are tables of absence, which list cases that are as alike as possible to the cases in the tables of presence except for the property under investigation. Any property that is found in the second case cannot be a sufficient condition of the original property. Finally, in tables of degree proportionate variations of two properties are compared to see if the proportion is maintained.Bacon rightly showed some hesitation in arriving at the goal he had prescribed for himself, namely constructing a method that would yield general propositions about substantial matters of natural fact that were certain and beyond reasonable doubt. But he hesitated for an insufficient, secondary reason. The application of his tables to a mass of singular evidence, he said, would give only a “first vintage,” a provisional approximation to the truth, because of the defects of natural history, that is to say, the defects inherent in the formulation of the evidence.There are, however, more serious difficulties. An obvious one is that Bacon assumed both that every property natural science can investigate actually has some other property which is both its necessary and sufficient condition (a very strong version of determinism) and also that the conditioning property in each case is readily discoverable. What he had himself laid down as the task of metaphysics in his sense (theoretical natural science in 20th-century terms), namely the discovery of the hidden “forms” that explain what is observed, ensured that the tables could not serve for that task since they are confined to the perceptible accompaniments of what is to be explained. This point is implied by critics who have accused Bacon of failing to recognize the indispensable role of hypotheses in science. In general he adopted a naive and unreflective view about the nature of causes, ignoring their possible complexity and plurality (pointed out by John Stuart Mill) as well as the possibility that they could be at some distance in space and time from their effects.Another weakness, not sufficiently emphasized, is Bacon’s preoccupation with the static. The science that came to glorious maturity in his own century was concerned with change, and, in particular, with motion, as is the natural science of the 20th century. It was with this aspect of the natural world that mathematics, whose role Bacon did not see, came so fruitfully to grips.The conception of a scientific research establishment, which Bacon developed in his utopia, The New Atlantis, may be a more important contribution to science than his theory of induction. Here the idea of science as a collaborative undertaking, conducted in an impersonally methodical fashion and animated by the intention to give material benefits to mankind, is set out with literary force.