Novum Organum
or
The New Organon:
Directions for the Interpretation of Nature
or
Where Did All This Neat Stuff Come From?
It is tempting to view history through the lens of Great Men, or Great Ideas. It is probably more correct to see historical progress in terms of people and broad-based movements. But there are occasional examples of milestones in history so profound and meaningful that they assume a stature so elevated that one must look at them in awe, and remark with a trembling awareness of accomplishment -- "That changed everything." Francis Bacon's New Organon is one such milestone. Here we find nothing less than the birth of modern science.
What is the New Organon? It is a book, a philosophy, a rebellion against nearly two thousand years of established thought. The "old" Organon was a system of deductive logic established by medieval scholastic philosophers, drawing on the teachings of Aristotle. The New Organon, published in 1620, was an essential element in Lord Bacon's "Great Renewal" -- a blueprint for a new instrument upon which to base the scientific enterprise.
Death to the Syllogism!
Bacon's work is both destructive and creative. In order to create the new science, the old order had to be destroyed. And the old order was that of Aristotle and deductive logic, symbolized by that ubiquitous artifice, the syllogism. The syllogism is a logical form requiring three parts, a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. For example:
Major Premise: Beer is Good
Minor Premise: Stag is Beer
Conclusion: Stag is Good
One can already begin to see the troubles with this, but the major problem is that the philosopher making the argument has no methodology for investigating the premises themselves. Rather than waxing philosophical and constructing argument after argument, the path of true knowledge lies in investigating the world itself. To this end, Bacon argues we ought to utilize
induction, rather than deduction to understand the world around us. And understanding our world is important because it then allows us to control and manipulate our environment. Aphorism III:
Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing, because ignorance of cause frustrates effect. For Nature is conquered only by obedience; and that which in thought is a cause, is like a rule in practice.
Unlike the magicians and theoreticians before him, Bacon places humanity back into the natural world, which we can tame and control, but only if we play by
nature's rules.
Be Crafty
While those priests and starry-eyed dreamers have been obsessing over Aristotle and producing nothing, there have been people intimately involved in exploring nature -- craftsmen. Blacksmiths, Architects, Cobblers, Bakers, and the like have been slowly learning how to perfect their trades. It is here that Philosophers must look for the origins of the new science. But these doers of deeds have their own problems, chief amongst them that they're illiterate savages. A man can work his trade for forty years, perfecting the baking process and producing the most wonderful bread that the world has ever seen... but is all for nought, for when he dies, he takes his knowledge with him. The Philosophers must leave their monasteries, towers, and well-upholstered dens and learn from the craftsmen, and then write it down. This, at least, is the first part of the new instrument.
Philosopher + Craftsman = Scientist
Bacon explains the middle path between the two in Aphorism XCV (95, for those of you unhip to Roman Numerals), the ant, the spider, and the bee:
Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empiricists or domatists. Empiricists, like ants, simply accumulate and use; Rationalists, like spiders, spin webs from themselves; the way of the bee is in between: it takes material from the flowers of the garden and the field; but it has the ability to convert and digest them. This is not unlike the true working of philosophy; which does not rely solely or mainly on mental power, and does not store the material provided by natural history and mechanical experiments in its memory untouched by altered and adapted in the intellect. Therefore much is to be hoped from a closer and more binding alliance (which has never yet been made) between these faculties (i.e. the experimental and the rational).
If people could have easily understood and accepted this truth, the rest of the book would be superfluous. This is science: the synthesis of philosophy and practicality.
The Four Idols
Perhaps the most famous portion of the work is Bacon's deconstruction of the illusions present in the human mind: the four idols of thought.
Idols of the Tribe are problems with our sensory perception. These are illusions shared by all humankind due to the inherent fallibility of our senses. Just because the world looks flat, does not mean that it is. Just because you hear your own echo, does not mean that someone is answering you. Escaping from this idol is a matter of knowing our shared limitations, and augmenting our senses with artifacts (rulers, telescopes, particle colliders, etc.)
Idols of the Cave are problems for the individual. Quite apart from our shared (mis)perceptions, each of us has his/her own prejudices, false beliefs, vanities, and other baggage that color our view of the world. Know this, and try not to be a prisoner to your own preconceptions. This idol also argues for the creation of a scientific community -- one man's prior beliefs may cause error in his theories, but not in everyone elses.
Idols of the Marketplace are the opposite -- mistakes made through the agreement of men. The problem here is fundamentally one of language. The words we use may say things we don't mean, or that we have no evidence for. Scientists should strive for clarity and exactitude in their language. Remember this the next time you're stuck reading something overly technical -- scientific jargon is a feature, not a bug.
Idols of the Theatre are false dogmas or theories, presented almost as a form of art. Bacon's recurring example is the uselessness of the syllogism, considered in his time to be the highest form of philosophy. But what has the syllogism ever accomplished? Nothing! I don't care how revered or famous a theory is, if can't stand up to rigorous scrutiny, throw it out!
The Project
In addition to destroying the old order, laying out a new direction for how to do science (in addition to induction, Bacon prescribed making hypotheses, falsifying them, and submitting them to peer review), and cataloguing the common mistakes men make when attempting to understand the world; Bacon inaugurated a project of Natural History. His new breed of scientists were to build a library of "Natural History", what we would now call a Database of Scientific Knowledge. Scientist Philosophers were to take the knowledge of craftsmen, use the new method of true induction to distill this practical knowledge to scientific knowledge, and record it. This record could then be used in other practical applications as a glorious project for the future of humankind, so that we could advance industry, cure diseases, fly to the moon, and share in the joy of indoor plumbing.