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Reading group: Bacon’s idols of the mind in the Novum Organum, Book One

Mona Fathy Contributor
· 5 replies · 261 views
Scientific methodIslamicModern EuropeanEmpiricismAl-BiruniFrancis Bacon#bacon#idols#induction#novum-organum
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I spend my working life classifying knowledge, so Bacon has always interested me as much for his ambition to reorganise the sciences as for his method. The New Organon (1620) is written in numbered aphorisms, which makes it ideal for slow reading in small pieces.

Plan, three weeks:

  • Week 1. The opening aphorisms of Book One: Bacon's contrast between anticipations of nature (hasty generalisations) and interpretation of nature (careful ascent from particulars), and his complaint that logic as practised fixes errors rather than discovering truths.
  • Week 2. The four idols: of the tribe (errors natural to human minds), of the cave (individual quirks), of the marketplace (words), and of the theatre (received philosophical systems).
  • Week 3. The rest of Book One, then a look at Book Two's tables of presence, absence and degrees, applied to the nature of heat.

Translation: the Cambridge edition by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne is reliable and has a good introduction.

A question: Bacon presents his method as new. How new is it, and how much of what he calls idols had others already diagnosed?

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5 replies

  1. Siobhán Keane

    Contributor

    Week 1. My favourite image is in Book One: the empirics are like ants who only collect, the rationalists like spiders spinning webs out of themselves, and the true philosopher like the bee, who gathers material and transforms it. It's a better summary of the empiricism-rationalism quarrel than most textbooks manage, and he wrote it before the quarrel had names.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Pieter de Jong

    Fellow

    Week 2. The idols of the tribe read like a list of cognitive biases. Bacon says the human understanding is more moved by affirmative instances than by negative ones, and once it has adopted an opinion draws everything else into agreement with it. In my field we call that confirmation bias and we build validation sets specifically to fight it. Four hundred years later, still the main enemy.

  3. Tal Rosen

    Contributor

    Week 2, the marketplace. As a translator I think the idols of the marketplace are the most underrated. Bacon's worry is that words formed for ordinary use carve things badly and then trap us into arguing about names. Every contract I translate between Hebrew and Arabic contains at least one word that means slightly different things on each side, and two lawyers who think they agree.

    Helpful · 1
  4. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    On Mona's question about novelty. Al-Biruni, in the preface to his great book on India, discusses why reports go wrong: partisanship, flattery of the powerful, repeating what one's own community says about another. It isn't Bacon's scheme, but it's a diagnosis of distorting habits of mind six centuries earlier, written by someone trying to describe another civilisation fairly.

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  5. Mona Fathy

    Contributor

    Week 3. The tables for heat are both brilliant and a little comic. He lists sunlight, fire, friction, fermenting dung, and works his way toward the conclusion that heat is a kind of motion. He's broadly right, and he got there by a procedure nobody now would follow. That seems to me the honest verdict on Bacon: right about the need for method, wrong that one method would suffice.

    Helpful · 3