Student Notes ; PHIL 112: February 26, 2013
(Edited and amplified by Mark Steen)
Bacon continued
Francis Bacon’s: The New Organonhe was attempting to bring about a revolution in science and
scientific method.
He severely criticizes Aristotle and the Aristotelians, often fairly, and often unfairly.
Aristotelian taxonoxmy of motions/changes:
-
Generationcoming into being of something
Corruptionthings going out of existence
Growth
Diminutionshrinking
Alterationbody parts changing
Motion propermotion (natural and violent)
Aristo often explained why a thing changes or does what it does by appealing to its “nature”, which is
linked up with its’ telos, or ‘ends’ or natural goal or function(s); This is how a (perhaps parody of an)
Aristotelian may go about answering the following inquirer:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
This dropped thing fell.
Why?
Because it is a rock.
Why do rocks fall?
Because they are made of earth.
Why does earth fall?
Because the Earth is it’s natural resting place.
Bacon criticized these kinds of explanations—often one is given the illusion that one has an
explanation where what one is really offered is just a re-description of what it already does and what
we already knew. Some of these explanations were circular as well. Here is a common example of
explanation leveled against Aristotelians (I’m not sure if they were ever this crude, but they were
perceived as such by Bacon, Descartes and others):
1.
2.
3.
4.
Why does opium make one sleepy?
Because of its soporific qualities.
What is a soporific quality?
The quality of making one sleepy.
This explanation is true, but completely uninformative.
The Aristotelian explanations are often teleological. That is, a thing’s actions or properties are
explained by reference to a thing’s ends/goals/natural function—which is also called a telos. For
example:
1. Why does the acorn turn into an oak tree?
2. Because it is the natural purpose of acorns. They come from oak trees in order to produce
oak trees. It is in their nature to act this way in the right circumstances.
Oppose this to mechanistic explanations:
1. Why is there sand on the beach?
2. Because rocks were washed down the rivers and pummeled by the river until they traveled
into the ocean, getting continuously ground apart and then washed up on the beach by the
tidal motions.
Bacon thinks that science should focus more on mechanistic ‘how’ facts and laws, less on ‘why’ or
teleological natures. Aristotelian science/philosophy is overly rationalistic, i.e., it thinks there is a
reason why for everything. But some facts (e.g., why electrons repel each other) are just brute. That
is, they have no explanation. Brute facts play the role in nature/science as axioms do in geometry.
Aristo located his brute facts at a very high level of generality, which retards research. Why put an
acorn under a microscope if you already know why it grows? Aristotelian natural philosophy gives the
illusion of knowledge.
But, in defense of Aristotle, not all teleological explanations are uninformative or useless. For
example—one could explain a courageous action by appealing to one’s courageous character as a
(partial) cause, but it’s never a total cause. We need to appeal to the agent’s knowledge, context,
whether they were not wounded, etc. Also, it is hard to know if we can ever really get rid of teleology
completely in science (especially in biology, where we speak of the function of the heart, flagella,
etc.).
Further in defense of Aristotle, some of his explanations acted like functional placeholders, which
modern science still does and perhaps needs to. Even modern science will notice phenomenon P and
just say that this is because of F, where F is just some kind of theoretical posit like ‘the thing which
will explain P.’ For example, scientists didn’t understand how particles got their mass and posited the
Higgs-boson, or don’t understand why they don’t perceive most of the mass of the universe, and call
the missing unobserved stuff ‘Dark Matter’.
In any case, it is true that the Aristotelian-informed scholastics didn’t go into the world and look at it,
while still seeking to pronounce upon its nature.
A lot of emphasis in Bacon about on going out into the world and experimenting.
Aristotle, a good philosopher but not good for science, thinks Bacon. He generalized too quickly.
Aristotle’s theory on Hylomorphisim (hyle=matter, morph=shape/form): in order to explain why a
thing is like it is, you need to explain at least 2 things. Appeal to structure, form and internal relation
of parts (sometimes called it’s ‘substantial form’) and the matter of the thing which is in the form.
These components are separate. One cannot explain why the car is the way it is only by it’s structure,
one needs to appeal to the kind of stuff it is made of (e.g. steel). If it was made of butter it wouldn’t
act the same as a car. Similarly, the nature of some stuff e.g. steel or butter won’t explain how the
car works or what a tree is like—we need both matter AND form.
Example with clay and statue; statue has shape and structure, and one can imagine the very same
structure realized by or ‘filled in’ by a different kind of matter or a completely different portion of
matter. So, one can have the structure/form without that particular matter. Similarly, one can have
the same matter with a different form, or perhaps no form at all—e.g. the clay before it is shaped
into a statue.
Aristotle also believed in Prime matter: matter which, in and of itself, apart from any form or
structure, has no qualities/properties at all. (For example, if some elemental stuff is fundamental
(i.e., not composed of any more simple parts), and yet this stuff could transform into some other
kind of elemental stuff, one may be tempted to think that in this case the very same stuff persists,
but not as stuff of some kind or another. And so there is some stuff which is not in itself any kind of
stuff.
Bacon thought prime matter doesn’t make sense.
Aristotle: teleology
Bacon: mechanism
(teleology is especially still used in biology--- but most biologists believe that it is convenient
shorthand (claims like ‘the function of the heart is to pump blood) which will ultimately disappear
upon investigation and analysis, and be replaced by mechanism)
Teleological picture of the world is false; more helpful for philosophy. Mechanism might be for
science.
Aristotelians used logic, but they didn’t look at the world really; Bacon looked at the world. A lot of
things that they thought that must be true, turned out to be wrong. Common sense can be wrong
too—experience is the ultimate arbiter of how the world is.
Physical vs logical.
Trying to get a method-inductive logic, experimental.
Any scientific progress was quite accidental. At this time there was a disconnect between the
practical (e.g. architecture, medicine, etc.) and the theoretical arts (e.g. natural philosophy, physics,
geometry, logic, epistemology, etc.).
In the colleges there were differences about certain doctrines that weren’t able to be solved. This is
an indicator that it is not scientific—not that it cannot as a matter of ability be solved, but that one
cannot even point out what experiences would falsify one’s theory.
-Hair splitting
Science and philosophy weren’t separated at the time. Science broke off from philosophy. Science
shouldn’t listen to philosophy. At that time they were the same. The first signs of the breaking off of
science from philosophy came with Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and other Early Modern philosophers
and scientists.
Bacon wonders -- Why didn’t science break off before hand?
It didn’t progress for a long time. 1st reason: the best minds applied themselves to what was
rewarded most, and for a long time that was moral and political philosophy.
Socrates changed the emphasis of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics’ focuson the nature of matter
and the natural world to moral and political philosophy.
Bacon thought this was a mistake.
You can’t run a race well if you do not know where the finish line is. You have no idea where you are
going---there are no goals, no methods ect. Similarly in science it was like this—there was no goals
set, and no methods for getting to any goals. It was a hodge-podge/mish-mash.
While Bacon thinks philosophy is good overall, purely theoretical non-experimental
philosophy/science won’t move us ahead with knowledge of the physical world and will not improve
human life. You don’t get your hands dirty. Try to make human life better. Get theoretical knowledge
which has application to physical world. Experience is going to be the judge. Get more emphasis on
quantities (measurements -- they didn’t use measurements for Aristotelian science) vs. qualities (e.g.
‘heaviness’, ‘heat’).
Descartes: (early 1600) – Meditation 1.
Famous for being the grandfather of Early Modern Philosophy and the ‘Epistemological Turn’ in
philosophy, as well as the most famous proponent of mind-body dualism. He also is famous for his
developments in analytic geometry and for general methodological contributions to Early Modern
science.
With his popular work, The Meditations, Descartes is seeking for a foundation for knowledge in a
broad sense. His method is that of radical doubt: doubt until you can’t doubt; if you find something
you can’t doubt on, then rely on that. If you cannot find anything that you cannot reasonably
doubt—then give up on having on any knowledge.
Our fundamental beliefs about the physical world he says rely on the testimony of the senses—but
we can doubt them (we’ll see how).
Descartes may seem like a skeptic, but he’s not ultimately. He wants to feign a kind of skepticism in
order to beat it.
The Meditations is a work of epistemology. Epistemology is knowledge theory—it’s subject is the
origin, limits, and nature of knowledge. But what is knowledge?
[note the below is not Descartes. One needs to be careful in these notes to differentiate between
what the readings say and what I lecture about].
Belief and knowledge are two different things:
Knowledge: some kind of achievement over mere belief. You can’t know something if you don’t
believe it. (all knowledge is belief). The traditional analysis of knowledge is that knowledge is justified
true belief. A more recent view is that knowledge is non-accidental true belief .
Belief can become knowledge via proof and evidence or by being caused in a reliable way.
The traditional analysis:
S knows that –p if and only if:
1- p is true
2- s must believe p
3- justification
But there is a problem (this is due to famous puzzles put forth by Gettier). Suppose I’m looking at a
sheep-shaped rock painted to look like a sheep in a field a bit far away. And suppose I’m in sheep
country, and I form the belief that there is a sheep in the field. And there is! There’s a sheep hiding
behind the sheep shaped-rock. I believe it. It’s true. And it seems justified since it looks like a sheep
and one, by hypothesis, would be reasonable in thinking that that is a sheep. But it doesn’t seem like
I know that there’s a sheep in the field (for starters, if there wasn’t a sheep in the field I would still
believe it). Some thought that the problem in this case is that one’s knowledge that p has to be
caused by the FACT that p. So, in this case, one’s belief that there is a sheep in the field is not caused
by the fact of the sheep’s being in the field, it is caused by the fact of a sheep-shaped painted rock
being in the field. So some have thought that we need to add the following condition:
4-causal connection between the thing believed and the belief.
But, this is a tangent. Descartes didn’t think exactly this way. Descartes seems to have believed that
knowledge is indubitable true belief.
Descartes wanted to prove global skepticism wrong. (A global skeptic thinks that there is no
knowledge of any kind—not even knowledge that the physical or external world exists .) In order to
prove skepticism wrong, he constructed the strongest possible skeptical idea and tried to beat it.
Make the best case for a position he doesn’t believe in in order to beat it at its strongest. This will
then show that every weaker skeptical position is wrong too.
Descartes employs arguments that involve skeptical templates like the following:
1. If I know that I’m looking at my hand, then I know I’m not dreaming.
2. I do not know that I’m not dreaming. (We often cannot tell when we are dreaming or
awake).
3. So, I don’t know that I’m looking at my hand.
How are you going to defeat the argument?
Descartes thinks that it is possible that he believes false things because his senses may be deceiving
him. If somebody lies to you, you don’t trust them again. If senses have deceived you before, why
trust them? How do you know they aren’t deceiving you all the time?
Descartes isn’t really a skeptic. He is just employing a skeptical method to find if, where, and how it
fails. And he thinks it does fail. More next time.