The status and reputation of Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is one of the great puzzles in the history of social thought. What had he actually accomplished to warrant all the accolades? Essentially, he was the metaempiricist, the head coach and cheerleader of fact grubbing, exhorting other people to gather all the facts. FULL ARTICLE by Murray N. Rothbard
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/14074/hail-prophet-of-empiricism-rethinking-sir-francis-bacon/
Hail, Prophet of “Empiricism”: Rethinking Sir Francis Bacon
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Rothbard was a great scholar, but he totally missed the mark here with Sir Francis Bacon.
According to this, Bacon’s method consisted of literally staring at unsifted data and waiting. Yet anyone who’s read even the briefest description of Bacon’s method, would have read something about Bacon’s sifting of data into specific-purpose tables and of his analysis by exclusion, the bare existence of which demonstrates the incorrectness of the above characterization. In fact Bacon deliberately formulated his method as distinct from “fact-grubbing”, which he called “ordinary induction”. Ordinary induction was characterized by Bacon himself as proceeding per enumerationem simplicem (by a mere enumeration of facts). Far from espousing such a crude method, Bacon wrote specifically against it.
A most informative post.
This is definitely a shallow, partisan, needlessly uncharitable reading of Bacon. Rothbard’s good guys vs. bad guys history of philosophy and economics, also evident in his treatment of Adam Smith, is not only unscholarly but fundamentally puerile. A fair-minded account of Bacon and his influence would at least discuss his defense of the study of philosophy and his positive assessment of progress in the arts and sciences.
Bacon’s induction is a renaissance of Aristotle’s concern with contextually essential causes. It is not empiricism, ie, rationally unorganized facts. Bacon is the most influential cause of the new, scientific use of systematic induction. Rationalism (Rothbard: the scientist, before gathering and collating facts, must have a pretty good idea of what to look for and why. [subjectivism or mysticism!]) is not the only alternative. The third alternative is objectivity, ie, knowing reality with logic, as Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, John McCaskey and David Harriman (_Leap Of Logic_) have discussed for physical science and Edwin Locke for psychology. See McCaskey for Bacon and the rise of modern science. McCasky has systemized and made explicit Aristotle’s scattered, often implicit, theory of induction.
I recommend to read Bacon’s book “The New Atlantis”, there he explains his ideas, so you could easily understand the bigger context, Bacon was not just a technical, a scientist working alone on a theory he considered interesting, he was part of a bigger agenda.
You can find more in youtube.com/watch?v=iKbiLBXIccw at minute 7:55, later you can go back to 5:15 or the whole small video.
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