Francis (1561–1626), English philosopher, essayist, and scientific methodologist. In politics Bacon rose to the position of lord chancellor. In 1621 he retired to private life after conviction for taking bribes in his official capacity as judge.
Bacon championed the new empiricism resulting from the achievements of early modern science. He opposed alleged knowledge based on appeals to authority, and on the barrenness of Scholasticism. He thought that what is needed is a new attitude and methodology based strictly on scientific practices. The goal of acquiring knowledge is the good of mankind: knowledge is power. The social order that should result from applied science is portrayed in his New Atlantis (1627). The method of induction to be employed is worked out in detail in his Novum Organum (1620). This new logic is to replace that of Aristotle’s syllogism, as well as induction by simple enumeration of instances. Neither of these older logics can produce knowledge of actual natural laws. Bacon thought that we must intervene in nature, manipulating it by means of experimental control leading to the invention of new technology.
There are well-known hindrances to acquisition of knowledge of causal laws. Such hindrances (false opinions, prejudices), which ‘anticipate’ nature rather than explain it, Bacon calls idols (idola). Idols of the tribe (idola tribus) are natural mental tendencies, among which are the idle search for purposes in nature, and the impulse to read our own desires and needs into nature. Idols of the cave (idola specus) are predispositions of particular individuals. The individual is inclined to form opinions based on idiosyncrasies of education, social intercourse, reading, and favored authorities. Idols of the marketplace (idola fori) Bacon regards as the most potentially dangerous of all dispositions, because they arise from common uses of language that often result in verbal disputes. Many words, though thought to be meaningful, stand for nonexistent things; others, although they name actual things, are poorly defined or used in confused ways. Idols of the theater (idola theatri) depend upon the influence of received theories. The only authority possessed by such theories is that they are ingenious verbal constructions. The aim of acquiring genuine knowledge does not depend on superior skill in the use of words, but rather on the discovery of natural laws. Once the idols are eliminated, the mind is free to seek knowledge of natural laws based on experimentation. Bacon held that nothing exists in nature except bodies (material objects) acting in conformity with fixed laws. These laws are ‘forms.’ For example, Bacon thought that the form or cause of heat is the motion of the tiny particles making up a body. This form is that on which the existence of heat depends. What induction seeks to show is that certain laws are perfectly general, universal in application. In every case of heat, there is a measurable change in the motion of the particles constituting the moving body. Bacon thought that scientific induction proceeds as follows. First, we look for those cases where, given certain changes, certain others invariably follow. In his example, if certain changes in the form (motion of particles) take place, heat always follows. We seek to find all of the ‘positive instances’ of the form that give rise to the effect of that form. Next, we investigate the ‘negative instances,’ cases where in the absence of the form, the qualitative change does not take place. In the operation of these methods it is important to try to produce experimentally ‘prerogative instances,’ particularly striking or typical examples of the phenomenon under investigation. Finally, in cases where the object under study is present to some greater or lesser degree, we must be able to take into account why these changes occur. In the example, quantitative changes in degrees of heat will be correlated to quantitative changes in the speed of the motion of the particles. This method implies that in many cases we can invent instruments to measure changes in degree. Such inventions are of course the hoped-for outcome of scientific inquiry, because their possession improves the lot of human beings. Bacon’s strikingly modern (but not entirely novel) empiricist methodology influenced nineteenth-century figures (e.g., Sir John Herschel and J. S. Mill) who generalized his results and used them as the basis for displaying new insights into scientific methodology.
See also INDUCTION ; MILL, J. S.; WHEWELL. R.E.B. Roger (c.1214–c.1293), English philosopher who earned the honorific title of Doctor Mirabilis. He was one of the first medievals in the Latin West to lecture and comment on newly recovered work by Aristotle in natural philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. Born in Somerset and educated at both Oxford University and the University of Paris, he became by 1273 a master of arts at Paris, where he taught for about ten years. In 1247 he resigned his teaching post to devote his energies to investigating and promoting topics he considered neglected but important insofar as they would lead to knowledge of God. The English ‘experimentalist’ Grosseteste, the Frenchman Peter of Maricourt, who did pioneering work on magnetism, and the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum influenced Roger’s new perspective. By 1257, however, partly from fatigue, Roger had put this work aside and entered the Franciscan order in England. To his dismay, he did not receive within the order the respect and freedom to write and teach he had expected. During the early 1260s Roger’s views about reforming the university curriculum reached Cardinal Guy le Gos de Foulques, who, upon becoming Pope Clement IV in 1265, demanded to see Roger’s writings. In response, Roger produced the Opus maius (1267) – an encyclopedic work that argues, among other things, that (1) the study of Hebrew and Greek is indispensable for understanding the Bible, (2) the study of mathematics (encompassing geometry, astronomy, and astrology) is, with experimentation, the key to all the sciences and instrumental in theology, and (3) philosophy can serve theology by helping in the conversion of non-believers. Roger believed that although the Bible is the basis for human knowledge, we can use reason in the service of knowledge. It is not that rational argument can, on his view, provide fullblown proof of anything, but rather that with the aid of reason one can formulate hypotheses about nature that can be confirmed by experience. According to Roger, knowledge arrived at in this way will lead to knowledge of nature’s creator. All philosophical, scientific, and linguistic endeavors are valuable ultimately for the service they can render to theology. Roger summarizes and develops his views on these matters in the Opus minus and the Opus tertium, produced within a year of the Opus maius. Roger was altogether serious in advocating curricular change. He took every opportunity to rail against many of his celebrated contemporaries (e.g., Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas) for not being properly trained in philosophy and for contributing to the demise of theology by lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences instead of the Bible. He also wrote both Greek and Hebrew grammars, did important work in optics, and argued for calendar reform on the basis of his (admittedly derivative) astronomical research. One should not, however, think that Roger was a good mathematician or natural scientist. He apparently never produced a single theorem or proof in mathematics, he was not always a good judge of astronomical competence (he preferred al-Bitruji to Ptolemy), and he held alchemy in high regard, believing that base metals could be turned into silver and gold. Some have gone so far as to claim that Roger’s renown in the history of science is vastly overrated, based in part on his being confusedly linked with the fourteenthcentury Oxford Calculators, who do deserve credit for paving the way for certain developments in seventeenth-century science. Roger’s devotion to curricular reform eventually led to his imprisonment by Jerome of Ascoli (the future Pope Nicholas IV), probably between 1277 and 1279. Roger’s teachings were said to have contained ‘suspect novelties.’ Judging from the date of his imprisonment, these novelties may have been any number of propositions condemned by the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, in 1277. But his imprisonment may also have had something to do with the anger he undoubtedly provoked by constantly abusing the members of his order regarding their approach to education, or with his controversial Joachimite views about the apocalypse and the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Given Roger’s interest in educational reform and his knack for systematization, it is not unlikely that he was abreast of and had something to say about most of the central philosophical issues of the day. If so, his writings could be an important source of information about thirteenth-century Scholastic philosophy generally. In this connection, recent investigations have revealed, e.g., that he may well have played an important role in the development of logic and philosophy of language during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the course of challenging the views of certain people (some of whom have been tentatively identified as Richard of Cornwall, Lambert of Auxerre, Siger of Brabant, Henry of Ghent, Boethius of Dacia, William Sherwood, and the Magister Abstractionum) on the nature of signs and how words function as signs, Roger develops and defends views that appear to be original. The pertinent texts include the Sumule dialectices (c.1250), the De signis (part of Part III of the Opus maius), and the Compendium studii theologiae (1292). E.g., in connection with the question whether Jesus could be called a man during the three-day entombment (and, thus, in connection with the related question whether man can be said to be animal when no man exists, and with the