Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

136 FRANCIS BACON AND MAN’S TWO-FACED KINGDOM
vindication of a prototype or paradigm of knowledge and of a criterion to gauge
it that he (unlike other thinkers) nowhere appears to have fully articulated in an
abstract and systematic manner. Yet, Bacon’s starting-point, as revealed by the
rhetorical devices he employs in order to commend his cognitive project and by
the religious mould in which he chooses to cast his programme, is as transparent
as it could be. Most significantly, Bacon contrasts the progress and
perfectiveness of human art, as portrayed in technical innovation, with the
stagnation and backwardness of philosophy (Parasceve I, 399; IV, 257; De
Augmentis II, ch. 2: I, 399f.; IV, 297f.). The printing press, the mariner’s
compass and the use of gunpowder are not only the indelible marks of modernity
but the living proof of the fertility of the human mind when correctly applied to
those things it is legitimately fit to know or invent. Yet, one should stress here
the tremendous axiological shift that Bacon is silently proposing as his rockbottom
option for, on purely logical grounds, nothing is intrinsically more
‘useful’ than anything else, except with respect to a scale of values which, in
itself, ought to remain beyond the very scope of discussion about fertility or
sterility. 33
The specific contents of a given philosophical discourse may originally
correspond to or be the basis of an ideal of science which, for a variety of
reasons, is subsequently forgotten or overshadowed by a competing one. That
Bacon’s insights into the nature of human knowledge constitute a coherent type
of operativist or constructivist epistemology in the sense enunciated above by no
means implies that the ingredients of Bacon’s scientific ideal could not have
been extracted from the original context and taken over by other cognitive
programmes or proposals. Ideas about induction, experiment, mattertheory and
the like belong to this class of ingredients, as do in other domains techniques of
measurement or the register of natural constants. The latter build up the specific
‘grammar’ of a discourse (i.e. its syntactic rules, its vocabulary and so on),
whilst the former are akin to the general semantics which the text ultimately
appeals to or reveals. Thus, the elementary propositions of geometrical optics
(e.g. the laws of refraction or reflection) can serve the purposes of and be
incorporated into both a corpuscularian and an undulatory theory of light.
Likewise, Bacon’s seminal insights about induction or experiment may be
studied, to a large extent at least, independently of any discussion about the
maker’s knowledge ideal.
Contrary to a widespread opinion, Francis Bacon was not the first philosopher
who tried to elaborate something akin to a logic of induction, and the wealth of
remarks left by Aristotle on epag g well deserve exposition and comment. 34
The scholastic tradition, by contrast, was more bent on the predominantly
deductive cast of Aristotle’s mind, and hence the Schoolmen’s references to
induction are both repetitive and shallow. 35 In brief, they distinguished between a
so-called inductio perfecta, which enumerated all the particulars under
consideration, and an inductio imperfecta, which omitted some of them and
therefore was liable to be overthrown by any contradictory instance. In neither