Changes

|Major Contributions=During his career, Bacon primarily wrote about subjects of legal or political interest as well as some works of great literary acclaim.[[CiteRef::Jones (1868)|pp. 60-65]] However, pertaining to the philosophy of science and the theory of scientific change, Bacon’s most significant contribution was in developing the Baconian methodology of science that was then adapted by the Cartesian and Newtonian schools, and still has many common elements to most current methodologies such as ascribing value to experimentation and inductive generalization. He also further developed the problem of sensations and the problem of induction, and proposed a solution to the problem of sensations. Initially, Bacon’s Novum Organum (in reference to Aritotle’s work Organon, the foundation of Aristotelian logic) was published as the first two books in a much larger collection known as Insuratio Magna which promised to be an even greater, six book reformulation of natural philosophy although most of the collection was never written and most of that which was published was incomplete. However, through these contributions, Bacon had a significant, still lasting impact on scientific methodologies and the theory of scientific knowledge.

Although the Aristotelian mosaic that was accepted during Bacon’s education provided a deductive description of the physical world from a set of axioms in each discipline, from as early as 1603, Bacon’s writing shows that he thought that it lacked a universal structure; there was no general way of doing science that was common across all subjects.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] In particular, he believed that it was too greatly based on metaphysical foundations; there was a strong focus on natural modes of action rather than on the actual phenomena observed. In this sense, Bacon thought that the Aristotelian worldview was overly presumptuous in terms of the knowledge we are capable of gaining about the physical world. Several followers of the Aristotelian worldview, such as Telesio, sought to reformulate it with a more well-founded basis however, Bacon was still not content with their resolutions. In Bacon’s Valerius Terminus, one can see that he argues that natural philosophy and divinity should be disconnected from one another, thereby further criticizing the accepted scientific mosaic which contained theology as one of its cornerstones.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]]

In his 1605 publication The Advancement of Learning, Bacon continues to reject the traditional Aristotelian school of thought since the Aristotelian logic puts its main emphasis on metaphysics and claims that which is revealed to our senses is necessarily the true behavior of reality.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] Effectively, he argues that the Aristotelian logic fails to take into account the problem of sensations and thus is not a sufficient system of enquiry in natural philosophy. He also criticizes the techniques of learning and writing about natural philosophy that were common in his time. In particular, he criticizes Cambridge University for its curricular emphasis on dialectical training, and the scholars of the time for their intellectual focus on book learning which he believed to be an ineffective way to study the physical world as no experiment or observation of the world could be made in this way.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] Here, Bacon first expressed his belief that experimentation should be of the foremost importance to studying the physical world, an element of the Baconian methodology that is still today employed.

In his Novum Organum, Bacon introduced his “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature”.[[CiteRef::Bacon (1878)]] This text was his normative manual for how he believed science should be done and in it, he lays the foundations for what would become the first empiricist methodology of science. It was in this text that Bacon first introduces the notion that scientists could learn about the world, rather than by thinking about it intuitively as was the Aristotelian tradition, but by making observations, collecting evidence, and then using this evidence to inductively make generalized claims about the world.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] This inductive approach was new to science and, although not initially accepted, eventually became a foundational element of how scientists conducted their research. Bacon argued that, under similar conditions, similar phenomena occur and so, if we seek to understand how the world works, we need to look at the conditions that lead to certain phenomena and generalize these observations to make causal statements about how the physical world behaves.

Bacon was not an instrumentalist however, he did believe that, only by interrogating nature itself, can we reach an understanding of its true form that can be of any practical significance.[[CiteRef::Briggs (Ed.) (1996)]] The major shift from the Aristotelian methodology to Bacon’s methodology was that the former drew generalized conclusions from individual observations and took these to be axiomatic, and then proceeded deductively to derive its scientific theories whereas the later supposes that the scientific theories are themselves the generalized axioms arrived upon through experimentation and observation; Bacon puts the generalization of observations as the conclusion rather than as the premise as the Aristotelians did.[[CiteRef::Briggs (Ed.) (1996)]] Furthermore, for Bacon, science was meant to be a democratic, collaborative endeavour where the people worked together towards a common goal rather than a subject shrouded in mystery that only an elite few could ever learn.[[CiteRef::Briggs (Ed.) (1996)]]

In Bacon’s celebrated Novum Organum, he describes a version of what is known as the problem of sensations. He said that, in perceiving the world, the human mind is subject to certain imperceptible faults that deceive our perceptions and sensations of the world around us which he refers to as idols.[[CiteRef::Bacon (1878)]][[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]]