Abstract
The function of the doctrine of prejudice is to explain any failure of devoted scientific research by blaming its operatives, or rather the prejudices that pollute their minds, since observers who endorse some theories before they observe see things wrongly. This is also the explanation of why all the labors of centuries of past research bore less fruit than what Bacon intended to achieve within a few years, or at least within a few generations (Novum Organum, 1, Aph. 178). Indeed, any optimist must have an answer to the obvious question, why was the past so bad when the prospects for the future are so bright? What is the cause of the expected radical change?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice” (Popper 2002, 48).
- 2.
Bacon offered two or three different classifications of the human prejudices; Works, 5, 602.
- 3.
I use here Kitchin’s translation. Ellis regularly put “logic” where Kitchin put “dialectics”. This is a mistake that goes beyond terminological niceties: Bacon used “dialectics” rightly to denote criticism; he was disappointed in the scholastic tradition that allowed criticism to fade into logic-chopping. All Renaissance mystics opposed scholastic logic-chopping. Bacon deemed it unavoidable and suggested instead taboo on promoting an unproven theory. Kant deemed advocates of hypotheses impostors and recommended preventing the display of their wares (first Critique, Preface Axv).
- 4.
Bacon could not distinguish between wild and tame generalizations (see Novum Organum, 2, 17).
- 5.
Bacon alluded to Fludd in his Cogitate et Visa. The Kabbalist aspect of The New Atlantis drew attention only recently (McKnight 2006, 23 ff.)
- 6.
Gaukroger refers to this aspect of Bacon’s project for reform—his demand for the personal reform of the researcher—and to the historical background to it (Gaukroger 2001, 7, 10, 13, 102, 104–5 and more).
- 7.
The Copernican Revolution undermined the authority of the ancients, as Copernicus noted early in his book. Buonamico then discovered that Aristotle and Archimedes were in disagreement and his student Galileo then tried to unite these two discoveries, thus steering a revolution in physics.
- 8.
Notice that Ramus took memory seriously (Ong and Johns 2004, xxiii, 194) and that he took for granted the expectation that the true classification will be remembered with no mnemotechnical device. This is a huge item in Renaissance mysticism that is inherently confused. It also links the backward-looking aspects of radicalism to ancient preliterate practices. This is an example for the thesis of Gershom Scholem (Scholem 1965, 7): “All mysticism has two contradictory or complementary aspects: the one conservative, the other revolutionary”. This holds for Bacon very significantly.
- 9.
It is always possible to ask whether a radical move is real. Bacon’s nineteenth-century critics said there was nothing new in his teaching. Thomas Spencer asserted that the claim of Petrus Ramus for having differed from Aristotle is erroneous (Spencer 1628, 213). So was his, of course.
- 10.
Ellis did not notice that as a radical Bacon was naïve. His naïveté hides behind the complexity of his ambitious spirit: he compared himself with Plato, Aristotle and Alexander the Great. We should consider this most naïve rather than censure it (Liebig) or explain it away (Spedding).
- 11.
Ellis was the first to notice—with surprise—that Bacon deemed uncertainty vicious. The reason for that lies in his doctrine of prejudice that Ellis took lightly.
References
Agassi, Joseph. 2008. Science and its history: A reassessment of the historiography of science, Boston studies in the philosophy of science, vol. 253. Dordrecht/Boston/London: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1845. Introduction to Encyclopedia Metropolitana.
Gaukroger, Stephen. 2001. Francis Bacon and the transformation of early-modern philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lemmi, Charles W. 1933, 1971. The classical deities in Bacon: A study in mythological symbolism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1837. The life and writings of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England. From the Edinburgh Review.
McKnight, Stephen A. 2006. The religious foundations of Francis Bacon’s thought. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Ong, Walter J., SJ, and Adrian Johns. (1958) 2004. Ramus, method, and the decay of dialogue: From the art of discourse to the art of reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Popper, Karl R. 1962, 2002. Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. London: Routledge.
Russell, Bertrand. 1956. Portraits from memory. London: Allen & Unwin.
Scholem, Gershom G. 1965. On the kabbalah and its symbolism. New York: Schocken.
Spencer, Thomas. 1628, 1970. The art of Logick: Deliuered in the Precepts of Aristotle and Ramus.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Agassi, J. (2013). The Function of the Doctrine of Prejudice. In: The Very Idea of Modern Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 298. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5351-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5351-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5350-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5351-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)