The New Scientific Method Rob Iliffe Aristotelian Method • Method, or the principles of argument and demonstration, played a highly important role in Aristotelian system • Medieval scholars understood the group of demonstrative techniques in different fields the ‘Organon’ (Latin ‘Organum’) or ‘tool’. • Aristotelian arguments were not primarily directed against sceptical positions, according to which one might doubt the reliability of individual sensory or cognitive faculties. • This is because ordinary human beings were assumed to experience the world as it really was, and were not deceived by their senses. The syllogistic method • Aristotle’s account of correct inference in science involved more sophisticated versions of the syllogistic method: • All As are Bs (Major premise, e.g. ‘All men are mortal’) • All Bs are Cs (Minor premise, e.g. ‘Socrates is a man’) • Therefore all As are Cs (Conclusion: e.g. ‘Socrates is mortal’). • Science proceeds by organizing data so that the Minor premise is explained by the better known, necessarily true and more fundamental Major premise. • Scientific demonstrations were supposed to go beyond mere syllogisms, to reveal the causal structures of the world. Art and Nature • The Aristotelian system placed limits on the use of artificial devices or techniques in natural philosophy – including mathematics. • Moreover, lenses were either distorting devices, or when they worked well – such as in magnifying glasses – • they made visible objects bigger to sight, rather than revealing things that were too small to be seen with the naked eye. • God would supposedly not have made creatures too small to be seen. • Philosophers assumed that instruments were ludic (playful devices) • And that invasive experimental techniques could not provide information about ‘natural’ motions, animate or inanimate. Art and Nature Transformed • New ‘methods’ proliferated in the early Seventeenth Century, • Produced at the same time as natural philosophy made obligatory the use of ‘tools’ such as mathematics, instrumentation, experiment – • The implication that the sensory and cognitive faculties of individual human beings were inadequate for discerning the depths of nature • Ran counter to Aristotelian assumptions about the dangers of using artifice to grasp natural truths • and the central notion that the world just was the way ordinary men and women experienced it (e.g. the sun really rose and set etc.). Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Bacon went to Cambridge University at a young age (12) and undertook legal training aged 15 before moving into politics - • becoming a Member of Parliament in 1581. • He was politically active from 1584 to 1616, becoming Attorney-General in 1613 and moving to the House of Lords in 1617. • He thrived under James I (reigned 1603-26), but tried unsuccessfully to convince the king to put his programme for reforming natural philosophy into action. • After being impeached for corruption (in 1621), he spent the last five years of his life trying to develop his programme under the heading of the Instauratio Magna Scientiarum (the Great Institution of the sciences) The criticism of Aristotelian Philosophy • Bacon became concerned with reforming natural philosophy from the late 1580s, seeking to rid philosophy of ‘frivolous disputations and verbosities, auricular traditions and impostures’. • From this point his criticisms of scholastic (Aristotelian) natural philosophy would form a coherent bundle: it was • Infertile, static, incoherent, narrow, tyrannical, and incomprehensible. • What was required was a reformation of philosophy so as to create a union of knowledge and power – • A philosophy that was implicated in the active not the contemplative life. The Idols and the Reformation of the Self • Idols of the Tribe – human understanding ‘is like an uneven mirror that cannot reflect truly the rays from objects, but distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it’. • Bacon condemned the tendency to jump too quickly to theories or conclusions, or to lazily accept the dicta of traditional authorities. • Solution was a medicina mentis to correct it, esp. in terms of a proper philosophical method and a healthy diet. • Other Idols were those of the Cave (prejudices due to education); • Idols of the Theatre (reliance on traditional philosophical systems); • Idols of the Market-Place (the use of false names, words or conceptions) The Baconian method • In the Advancement of Learning (1605) Bacon rejected the textual focus and slavish respect for canonical authorities (especially Aristotle) that was current in universities. • The empirical engagement with Nature (initially in the form of Observation) was necessary for doing natural philosophy, but against the Aristotelean position, • Individual sense-experience (which provided the Minor Premise of the limited and useless syllogism) was not by itself sufficient to provide the understanding with information about the real world. • Instead, observation had to be collaborative, disciplined and interventionist – nature had to be ‘subject to vexations and made to confess’. The Novum Organum (1620) • The preface to the Novum Organum announced that the new method would restore senses to their previous (high) status in science, • in a sense, allowing humans to be like the first Man (Adam) was. • The goal of knowledge was to be useful and to improve the situation of Mankind, restoring humans to a prelapsarian state. • Armed with true knowledge, humans could command Nature and transform it for beneficial purposes. • Note frontispiece to the work, from Daniel 12:4 – ‘multi pertransibunt et augebitur Scientia’ Natural History and the Pyramid of Knowledge • Bacon argued that Natural philosophy should become part of natural history, whose goal was the discovery and (perhaps) production of significant and useful facts. • Natural philosophy should start with disciplined observations, leading by ‘Induction’ through a combination of judicious speculation and testing, • to the discovery of what Bacon called ‘forms’ • These were general principles, such as ‘heat’, which could be shown to be the physical causes of all phenomena. • One would eventually arrive at Axioms or Laws of Nature Future Progress • Bacon deliberately set out to write an account in which his own time would be the start of scientific progress, • he invented a radically new conception of progress, which was to be slow, based on observation and experiment, and the result of hard work. • He was inspired by progress in the arts and trades, and his writings were influenced by a number of contemporary genres such as accounts of the New World, and utopias, and even biblical prophecy. • He wrote an extraordinary utopian work entitled New Atlantis, which is superficially a secular utopia with major techno-scientific elements, • But which on closer inspection, has religious components and goals. René Descartes and The Cartesian method • Educated at the Jesuit La Flèche college, trained in law, then fought in 30 Years War from 1618. • Later remembered that he had conceived a programme for eradicating doubt and finding certainty in November 1619. • Met the physico-mathematician Isaac Beeckman at Breda, and was moved to devise and refashion his ‘mechanical philosophy’ over the next three decades. • Wrote an (unfinished) essay, ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’ in the late 1620s, • involving the analysis of processes into smaller parts, each of which could be known with certainty, and then recombined. René Descartes (1596-1650) Principia Philosophiæ (1644) ‘Mundus EST Fabula’ The Discourse on Method • Told Marin Mersenne in 1629 that he was proposing to write a monumental analysis of all of physics, which he finished in 1632 (‘Le Monde’). • This was suppressed because of the Galileo trial. • Residue from le Monde -- major works on optics, meteorology and mathematics published in 1637, prefaced by the Discourse on Method. • Meditations, with ‘Evil Genius’ argument, published in 1641, followed by the highly influential Principia Philosophiae in 1644 Cartesian method • Descartes proposed that the cosmos was full (a ‘plenum’, composed of ‘extension’), • and stressed that the goal of philosophy was to offer physical causes. • He condemned scholastic notions such as ‘substantial forms’ as dangerous and imaginary entities, that served no useful purpose. • Primary method was an introspective pathway to the removal of doubt arising from the senses, • purporting to deduce a priori that the world was composed of parts of matter (extension) in motion. • Staring point was metaphysics – observations had a supporting role. Tree of science (Preface to Principia) • ‘Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree. The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. By “morals” I understand the highest and most perfect moral system, which presupposes a complete knowledge of the other sciences and is the ultimate level of wisdom.’ • Inversion of Bacon? Empiricism and anti-Cartesianism • Cartesianism was seductive and had many supporters in the two decades after his major works were published in the 1640s. • However, Baconian-inclined scientists, especially in England and the Netherlands, held that Descartes’s method was unproductive and could not generate any truths about the real world. • For them, his laws of motion were false; his vortex accounts were figments