Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 139
(IV, 184f.; I, 298f.)
It is obvious from this presentation of the dilemma that Bacon is stressing the
importance of a falsificationist procedure of the modus tollens kind: the end
result expresses, logically speaking, the rejection of one hypothesis rather than
the confirmation of its rival. The tacit presupposition that they exhaust the field
of possible hypotheses is irrelevant at this stage; for Bacon inductio is an openended
process and a third hypothesis may be suggested afterwards.
Now in order to decide between the two theories Bacon goes on to propose an
experiment which reproduces a pattern of reasoning already deployed in the
Table of Rejections and Exclusions. The following instantia crucis 42 bears the
mark both of Bacon’s artificialist approach to natural inquiries (the whole point
now is to create new data) and of the eminently deductive character of the whole
procedure:
Take a clock moved by leaden weights, and another moved by the
compression of an iron spring; let them be exactly adjusted, that one go no
faster than the other; then place the clock moving by weights onto the top
of a very high steeple, keeping the other down below; and observe
carefully whether the clock on the steeple goes more slowly than it did on
account of the diminished virtue of its weights [propter diminutam virtutem
ponderum]. Repeat the experiment [experimentum] in the bottom of a
mine, sunk to a great depth below the ground; that is, observe whether the
clock so placed does not go faster than it did, on account of the increased
virtue of its weights [per auctam virtutem ponderum]. If the virtue of the
weights is found to be diminished on the steeple and increased in the mine,
we may take the attraction of the mass of the Earth as the cause of weight.
(IV, 185; I, 299)
Thus, we may extract at least five deductive procedures embedded in the fabric of
Bacon’s so-called induction, all of them leading to an educated guess (opinabile)
as to the Form or explanation of the phenomenon under scrutiny. 43 This of
course reinforces our claim that Bacon was using the term inductio in an extremely
loose sense, meaning perhaps what a modern would call ‘a logic of scientific
discovery’, rather than trying to ‘ameliorate’ the procedure called by that name
as understood by contemporary rhetoricians and philosophers.
Nor is this all. If we go back to the famous Baconian inquiry as to the Form of
heat, we shall find that the (provisional) end result or vindemiatio prima (literally,
‘first vintage’) runs as follows:
Heat is a motion, expansive, restrained and acting in its strife upon the
smaller particles of bodies. But the expansion is thus modified; while it
expands all ways, it has at the same time an inclination upwards. And the