Francis Bacon and the True Ends of Skepticism

Just as analyzing government mismanagement should actually give hope (Bacon wistfully reflected) because it shows the failure was not inevitable, so he will offer "arguments of hope," by analyzing the bad habits of mind and futile methods so far used in science (1960, 94). Both mind and senses are unreliable, yet the right method of using mind to correct mind, as we look from a different angle to correct sight, might repair our faults just enough to achieve reliable theories. And this, in essence, has proven true.

Bacon's Checks and Balances

Unlike most revolutionaries (but like the American founders), Bacon offers not a cure, but "helps": checks and balances (1960, 37). First is the thinker's deliberate attention to each pitfall. Second, his limits will be bypassed by involving diverse inquirers. And finally, the theory-making urge itself must be challenged by experimental tests of each assumption and conclusion. The inquirer's thinking will also be affected. What counts as a theory or a scientific term will be guided by his awareness that an eventual empirical test is in the offing. (And, conversely, dubious scientific thought is influenced by the knowledge that no rigorous test will be applied.)

Bacon's paradoxical message--the mind is faulty, the mind can achieve wonders--is usually misunderstood, ignored, or quoted misleadingly. [2] Yet it is at the heart of the mission of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. For Bacon grasped that scientific method must be intimately linked with a critique of pseudo-science, and that such a critique was not to be just a start-up routine for modern science, but would be of continuing, even increasing, importance. The more that inquiry prospered, the more its intellectual, semantic, and institutional offshoots would be vulnerable to the Idols of the mind. [3]

Bacon saw that the three Idols might generate whole systems of belief, tightly inwoven, fiercely defended, securely institutionalized, and thus hard to dislodge. His fourth category, "Idols of the Theatre," referring to the "vain show" of such a system, incorporates all the others. Though familiar mainly with the Scholastic system, he expected that as freer thought was permitted, many new, specious systems would arise (1960, 61-66, 44). The fame of his initiating role for modern science has obscured his concern with the perennial. Even Stephen J. Gould, in a recent article, mentions only "outmoded," or "older, traditional" systems as Bacon's target, rather than the system-making propensity of the human mind. [4]

Bacon did not envisage the mathematical physics to come; indeed, he could hardly know what a powerful theory would look like. Thus he thought more generally about the search for meaningful patterns in the confusion of phenomena, making his ideas particularly relevant to fledgling and would-be sciences. He hoped that ethics and politics would also yield to his ideas: But the notion of creating a science of society tends to make people aim for universal laws, exact measurements (of something), and the prestige of a system. Soon after Bacon's death, Thomas Hobbes attempted such a science, with simple mechanical principles in the style of physics. But such efforts ought to be "scientific" first in heeding Bacon's warnings about straying from the facts and clinging to assumptions or terminology that cannot lead to new, testable insight. Bacon would have us spend more time with tentative "middle principles." Pioneers such as Freud, eager to make their ideas science, are in danger of taking any plausible mechanism to be a universal principle. Bacons reluctance to assume uniformity, though misplaced in physics, is more pertinent in studying human nature.