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Lesson 1.3: Knowledge Is Power
9 Plays7 days ago
Francis Bacon’s revolution wasn’t about solving the old puzzles of knowledge, but about changing the very rules of inquiry — turning epistemology outward, toward the world.
Topics discussed:- The Aristotelian worldview once made the world feel intelligible, but its central pieces began to collapse under new observations and conceptual pressures.
- Around 1600, linguistic, technological, and cultural shifts gave rise to a new meaning of “experiment”: not trying something, but deliberately manipulating nature to reveal hidden causes.
- Early experimentalists were seen as eccentric outliers whose strange new practices challenged tradition and authority.
- Francis Bacon argued that knowledge begins with experience, requires purging our “idols,” and aims at prediction, control, and the relief of human suffering.
- Bacon introduced ideas that anticipate empiricism, pragmatism, and positivism—each redefining what it means to know and what counts as meaningful inquiry.
- Though powerful, Bacon’s model faces the challenge that predictive and explanatory success can still come from false theories (e.g., Ptolemy, alchemy).
- The lesson closes by placing Bacon’s “knowledge is power” view beside Plato’s JTB theory, raising the question: What is knowledge, really?
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Transcript
Ancient Knowledge Claims: Pyronian Skeptics & Aristotle
00:00:06
Speaker
In the last lesson, we were talking about two big ancient takes on knowledge. We are speaking, of course, of the battle between, on the one hand, the Pyronian skeptics, and on the other hand, not quite Plato's view on knowledge, maybe just a view that he mentioned, or maybe he believed it. Hey, you never know.
00:00:33
Speaker
but Today we're going to look at yet another ancient knowledge claim or set of knowledge claims because Plato and Pyro were not the only ancient minds that were still affecting philosophy in the early modern period.
Aristotelian Worldview: Earth-Centric Universe
00:00:55
Speaker
ah We also have the views of Aristotle in a way still around. Aristotle, of course, was always influential during the Middle Ages, and he goes back all the way to the fourth century BCE. In fact, he was Plato's student.
00:01:15
Speaker
but something that sort of resembled Aristotle's view on physics had sort of dominated ah the intellectual a milieu for like 2000 years basically.
00:01:30
Speaker
So we're going to refer to this set of views as the Aristotelian worldview. Let me just say right off the bat that it's not exactly what Aristotle believed.
00:01:42
Speaker
but it was built on Aristotelian ways of thinking. So that's why i would just kind of use the label Aristotelian worldview as shorthand.
00:01:54
Speaker
And so this Aristotelian worldview, honestly, for like 2000 years, was what most intellectuals believed in Western Europe. but that was on the process or in the process of getting overthrown by a different worldview, what we might call the Newtonian worldview.
Worldviews: Beliefs and Reasoning
00:02:18
Speaker
Now, just like in the case of the Aristotelian worldview, The Newtonian worldview wasn't only the product of Isaac Newton, but it's definitely the case that by the time that Isaac Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica in 1687, that pretty much was the death nail for the Aristotelian worldview. So that is a story or one of the stories that we'll be telling in this lesson.
00:02:53
Speaker
Let's begin by talking about worldviews. We'll get a ah grip on what the idea even means. And then we'll talk about how worldviews die. And yeah, it'll be fun. So let's start with a worldview.
00:03:10
Speaker
a worldview is a grand puzzle that makes the world feel intelligible. Maybe you want to use some synonym like ideology or something like that to help you wrap your mind around this whole concept of a worldview.
00:03:32
Speaker
What I want to make sure is very clear is that it's not just a set of beliefs. All right. It's not just like you take, you know, all your beliefs and you kind of list them. It's a coherent system of beliefs where each belief supports the others.
00:03:50
Speaker
So maybe and another analogy besides that of a puzzle is that of a web, like a web of beliefs where the beliefs all support each other.
00:04:03
Speaker
So if you have a worldview, and by the way, you definitely do, it helps you make sense of reality. It's a bunch of beliefs that together help you understand the world.
00:04:17
Speaker
Worldviews tell you what kinds of things exist, for example. they tell you what counts as an explanation. So if you're like one of my buddies who is maybe one of the most hardcore atheists I've ever met in my life, truly a fire-breathing atheist, I should say,
00:04:38
Speaker
Well, he has his worldview and it doesn't include the existence of God, of course.
Trust in Sources: Science vs. Spirituality
00:04:45
Speaker
And he has his ideas as to what counts as an explanation.
00:04:50
Speaker
For example, if he went to the mechanic and they said something like, there's ghosts in your engine. I'm pretty sure he would say to them, I'm taking my business elsewhere.
00:05:04
Speaker
And that's if you catch him on a good day. If he's not being too polite on a given day, maybe he would say something worse than that. But the point is, for him, his worldview just helps him understand that conversation with that mechanic is probably not going anywhere because what the mechanic gave as an explanation just literally doesn't make any sense to him.
00:05:28
Speaker
And so that is a product of the specific worldview that he has. Maybe most importantly, your worldviews, right? Whatever ones that you hold, you personally, it quietly teaches you how to reason and who or what to trust.
00:05:52
Speaker
So how are you going to get to the right beliefs? Well, my buddy only trusts the scientific process. That is part of his worldview. Maybe you trust the scientific process, but maybe You don't, or maybe you have another set of ah of processes for arriving at the truth.
00:06:13
Speaker
Who
Perception Shaped by Worldviews
00:06:14
Speaker
do you trust? Well, my buddy trusts, you know, academic textbooks and scholars and peer reviewed, you know, scientific articles. Maybe you trust those things too. That's part of your worldview.
00:06:29
Speaker
Maybe you trust, I don't know, ah priests or shamans or other spiritual leaders, right? So there's all kinds of possible worldviews.
00:06:42
Speaker
And you can sort of frame this lesson as a battle between two worldviews. That's what we're going to sort of look at here. And so maybe I should mention one other thing here about worldviews. And it's basically the fact that people rarely see their worldview. it it just you know You're not really always, at least, consciously aware of it.
00:07:09
Speaker
You can make yourself consciously aware of it by really thinking about your epistemic positions. But as I mentioned in the last lesson, no one really does that you know naturally. it is quite effortful to do that.
00:07:26
Speaker
And so what we mostly tend to do is see through our worldview. We see it like, ah it's almost like we have augmented reality you know goggles and they're sort of stuck to our head.
00:07:44
Speaker
And if we think about it real hard, we can separate what we see you know through our eyes and what we see because of the goggles. But our worldview is sort of like strapped onto us and it's really hard to not see through it.
00:08:00
Speaker
Okay, well, that is what a worldview is.
Aristotelian Cosmos: Elements and Ether
00:08:05
Speaker
Now, we are in this lesson considering the Aristotelian worldview as one of the worldviews here on offer.
00:08:14
Speaker
And as I mentioned earlier, it's basically on the way out here in the 17th century. but let's first describe this Aristotelian worldview according to this way of thinking about reality first and foremost the earth is the center of the universe and does not move right so there it is right smack in the center of the universe there is nothing else ah you can tell
00:08:46
Speaker
in this diagram here other than basically our solar system and the stars are nearby or they are nearer than we now know them to be okay what else is a part of the Aristotelian worldview well There's only five elements and you probably have heard about them.
00:09:08
Speaker
Earth, water, air, fire, and ether. Maybe you haven't heard about ether, but that is something that the ancients believed in. Actually, ether they believed in until about the year 1900
00:09:26
Speaker
I think I have my figures right on that one. They just kind of changed what ether meant, but it's okay. Let's think about the ancient worldview because the elements for the ancients were very different than they are for us.
00:09:41
Speaker
According to the Aristotelian worldview, elements like earth and fire and air, they all moved according to their natures. In other words,
00:09:53
Speaker
Each of these elements had a way of moving that was determined by the kind of thing that it is. So Earth and water fall.
00:10:05
Speaker
ah And of course, what is at the center of the universe, Earth. So they fall towards the center of the universe, right? They fall towards Earth. And if you want to test this idea, go ahead and grab some Earth and throw it Not at someone, just throw it up.
00:10:23
Speaker
Not directly above yourself either. That would be a bad idea. And see what happens. Of course, it goes to the ground. You can do the same with water. Also, again, not at someone or yourself.
00:10:35
Speaker
And yeah, the same thing. Toss a cup of ah just the water in a cup upward and it will, of course, hit the ground eventually because that's what earth and water do. They move toward the center of the universe. Notice there is no notion of gravity.
00:10:52
Speaker
It's just what earth and water do. They go towards the earth. What about air and fire? They tend to rise. And this one, let's let's not do an experiment with the fire. you can just trust me that fire does rise.
00:11:08
Speaker
With air, if you want, you can go get a cup of water and a straw and blow into it. And you will see that the bubbles go to the top because air and fire move away from the center. That is what it means to rise if the earth is at the center of the universe.
00:11:27
Speaker
So that is the nature of air and fire to rise. Ether, by the way, Ether operates above the moon.
00:11:39
Speaker
So everything below the moon up is is mostly made out of those five elements or is exclusively, I should say, made out of the four elements that I just mentioned, earth, water, air and fire.
00:11:50
Speaker
But Ether, that fifth element, that resides in the supra or super lunar region. anything beyond the moon and what does ether do it moves in circles perfect circles and so because all the planets are beyond the moon that is why the planets move in circular motions It's the ether having its effect on them.
00:12:21
Speaker
So I wanna say, wanna say a lot of things about the Aristotelian worldview, to be honest, I'm actually holding back, believe it or not. But here's maybe the part that I want to focus on.
00:12:35
Speaker
It wasn't superstition, right? ah It was actually a coherent theory And they had arguments for it. It's not like the ancients just kind of believed any old thing.
00:12:52
Speaker
In fact, I think that if you lived in the ancient world and you seem to be a pretty clever person, if you're taking my class, I'm pretty sure that you would have believed in the Eritetelian model too.
00:13:08
Speaker
There were arguments for it and empirical observations. Now, I'm not going to give you all the arguments, just maybe a smattering of some of my favorites.
00:13:19
Speaker
First and foremost, people knew the Earth was spherical. And there was really there were like be a couple of cool ways that they figured this out.
00:13:30
Speaker
And they even figured out, you know, the circumference of of the Earth and they had to wait for eclipses to do this. And anyway, it was really, really cool. And, you know, they weren't dummies. They knew that the Earth was a sphere and they knew roughly ah how how big it was.
00:13:48
Speaker
They also, because they knew these things, they knew that the Earth rotated at a little bit over a thousand miles per hour and that it happened at the equator.
00:14:00
Speaker
Well, ah this is one empirical reason for why they believed that the earth didn't move. You ever been in and a ride share, right? Maybe you're in an Uber ride and the person is driving really fast. You know, some people do that. They drive like they want to die, like right now.
00:14:22
Speaker
ah it You can feel it, right? You can kind of feel the g-force of the Uber driver's foot and you can kind of feel yourself getting pushed back.
00:14:34
Speaker
Well, um if the earth is moving at a thousand miles per hour, in other words, way faster than your Uber, why don't you feel it?
00:14:47
Speaker
Well, if you don't know the reason, Neither did the ancients. And basically they concluded, well, that must mean that the earth isn't moving.
00:14:58
Speaker
Because if it were moving, again, we know how what its circumference is. So we know it'd be moving at around a thousand miles per hour. We don't feel that. So it must be the case that it isn't moving.
00:15:12
Speaker
That is a perfectly valid argument. Is it sound? Well, probably as we know, it's it's not. But that is the in the very least the result of careful reasoning.
00:15:26
Speaker
Okay, what else did the Aristotelian model rest upon? What other kind of evidence? Well, the ancients knew that large objects don't move without massive forces. And of course, the earth is very large indeed. And they couldn't think of a massive force that could have an effect on it.
00:15:48
Speaker
There's another reason why the Aristotelian model with the earth at the center and not moving made sense to them. And I'll give you one more.
00:16:01
Speaker
Fire rises, rocks fall. They had a theory as to how the elements worked. And, you know, it just seemed to be that everything cohered together. It made sense, like all the puzzle pieces fit together.
00:16:19
Speaker
And so because it fit everyday experience and because it explained the data that they had available to them. The ancients believed in this Aristotelian worldview and so did the people in the Middle Ages and so did people, you know, through the 1500s.
00:16:40
Speaker
That is exactly how powerful the reasoning behind this worldview was. People believed it for, again, around 2000 years.
00:16:52
Speaker
But it's not just about astrophysics. Your worldview is more than just a picture of the universe. It's actually in an indirect kind of way, establishing and supporting all kinds of other beliefs. For example, the idea that we should trust in tradition and authority, that gets reinforced by the Aristotelian worldview.
Aristotelian vs. Bacon's Empirical Approach
00:17:24
Speaker
This idea that we have this way of thinking about the universe that literally goes back, you know, at one point, 2000 years, that sort of puts into your mind this idea that older is better and it's been working for so long.
00:17:42
Speaker
Why in the world would we change it, right? So authority figures, and tradition sort of get a boost from this worldview and the fact that it dominated for so long.
00:17:56
Speaker
Also this idea that an explanation ought to be having to do with purposes, right? Today, when you you know get an explanation from physics, it's all about mechanisms and equations and that kind of stuff.
00:18:15
Speaker
But for the Aristotelian worldview, the way that you explain things is through the function of the thing, right? So fire rises.
00:18:27
Speaker
Why? Because ah fire rises. It's in its nature to rise. That's what fire does. And so everything has its purpose. And so that's what it's going to do.
00:18:40
Speaker
This also, by the way, reinforces the authority idea, right? An authority figure has its purpose to tell people what to do. So it makes sense that we who aren't authority figures listen to them.
00:18:56
Speaker
Same thing with tradition, right? So tradition dictates what we do and so that is its purpose and our purpose is to follow it. And so that is what we should do.
00:19:09
Speaker
Obey tradition and authority. Okay, one more here that is sort of not immediately evident or intuitive, but reason is superior to experiment.
00:19:24
Speaker
So this worldview had dominated for so long that it just kind of made sense that, you know, if you see, if you observe something and it doesn't quite jive with the worldview,
00:19:40
Speaker
Well, assume that the worldview, which is also basically common sense at the time, ah assume that that is correct and assume that your observation, i don't know, something messed it up, it something in your you know process of looking at you know reality got got messed up so that what you saw contradicted the Aristotelian worldview.
00:20:06
Speaker
So that is another thing that the Aristotelian worldview reinforced, this idea that trust and reason, right? Explanations have to have purposes, trust in tradition, trust in authority.
00:20:21
Speaker
It's a different way of thinking, right?
Shift to Newtonian Worldview
00:20:24
Speaker
And so it's definitely the case that overthrowing this is going to take some heavy hitter names. I mean, if you look at the history of how we moved moved from the Aristotelian worldview into the Newtonian worldview,
00:20:45
Speaker
Those are some pretty big names in there, right? Kepler, Galileo, Newton, right? Even if you don't know what these people argued, you know their names, right? So this was a massive undertaking to defeat this way of thinking.
00:21:01
Speaker
And of course, when it was defeated, well, you can expect that trust in tradition and authority would begin to wane, right? And this idea that experiments you know, they can't really counter common sense, that also began to go away. So we have to wonder how do worldviews die?
00:21:26
Speaker
Aristotelian worldview died, how did it happen? Well, we've been using this analogy of of a puzzle. And so the basic idea is that a worldview will survive as long as its central pieces hold.
00:21:45
Speaker
But when those central pieces stop fitting together, when they no longer cohere, the worldview will die. And so for the Aristotelian system, the key pieces are the following.
00:22:03
Speaker
There is an Earth-centered cosmos. There is a teleological structure to nature. That's this idea that all the elements have a purpose and a function.
00:22:15
Speaker
That is what teleology means. There is also the division between a perfect heaven and an imperfect earth. So below the moon,
00:22:27
Speaker
the earth, fire, air and water, all those elements, they all moved according to one set of rules and beyond the moon, the perfect realm, that is where ether dominated.
00:22:42
Speaker
and so basically, there's two different sort of realities if you want to think about it that way. A certain set of rules operate on here on earth and everywhere beneath the moon.
00:22:57
Speaker
And another set of rules operate beyond the moon. And so very important here, not one set of equations could possibly govern both below the moon and beyond the moon.
00:23:13
Speaker
It is two separate sets sets of equations. So that is, of course, different from what Newton believed.
Collapse of Worldviews: Aristotelian to Newtonian
00:23:20
Speaker
For Newton, it didn't matter if you're you know calculating a cannonball, the trajectory of a cannonball,
00:23:27
Speaker
or the trajectory of Venus, right? It is the same set of equations. Last central piece of the Aristotelian system that we're mentioning here at least, is that motion is explained by intrinsic natures, right? So fire rises, Earth goes to the center, not forces. There is no mention here of gravity.
00:23:56
Speaker
You can imagine that as there were new and better observations that challenged the central pieces of the Aristotelian worldview, well, this web of beliefs just no longer seemed as cohesive and the whole thing began to fall apart.
00:24:22
Speaker
Okay, this has all been very abstract. Let's dive here into story time. Okay, we are in London.
00:24:36
Speaker
The year, my friends, is 1600.
17th Century London Life
00:24:41
Speaker
And this is not a terrible time to be alive, at least in this particular place.
00:24:47
Speaker
This is known as the Tudor period, which is by and large a general i sorry of a time of stability and even growth. So it's a pretty good time period in general, but it is actually during a quite stable reign, that of Queen Elizabeth I in the throne or on the throne for about 45 years.
00:25:16
Speaker
Now, it wasn't 100% honky dory. There was still, of course, as we mentioned, some religious violence. in particular the Protestants were and not being very nice to the Catholics but before this the Catholics had not been very nice to the Protestants you know how it goes in this time period it's not it's not very pleasant on the religious dimension but once of course we get beyond that part though in other domains things were looking pretty good first and foremost
00:25:55
Speaker
There were some advancements in cartography, which is map making, as well as the study of magnetism, which allowed for, well, a couple of things. First and foremost, better trade.
00:26:11
Speaker
you are able to navigate ah more easily through the globe you can go more places in a more efficient way without losing ships and all that and trade for the most part is always ah good thing and so the fact that you were able to get more ships to and fro your trading partners and back from them, that would be a good thing if you were living in London.
00:26:45
Speaker
Besides that, good ships and you know a lot of practice, a lot of time on the sea makes for a good Navy. And so right around this time, the English defeat the Spanish Armada.
00:27:00
Speaker
If you don't know about the Armada, They were basically thought to be invincible, but that was not the case forever.
00:27:11
Speaker
And in 1588, the English defeat the Spanish at sea. Okay, so maybe that doesn't affect you personally if you're not a sailor, but let's just say that you are living in 1600.
00:27:26
Speaker
What does life look like for you? Well, let me just focus on maybe the really important things. ah There was a rise in literacy, and that actually has to do, maybe surprisingly, it has to do with Protestantism because the Protestants taught that you need to develop a personal relationship with God And the way you do that is by reading the Bible.
00:27:53
Speaker
And so that just means you have to read, right? So kind of wild, but Protestant our areas were more literate than non-Protestant areas where the Catholics were in charge.
00:28:08
Speaker
Hey, you know, there's also no famine. I'm not saying you're eating burgers or anything like that, but, you know, to live through, a you know to get through a lifetime, in the 1600s without famine. that's ah That's a nice thing, all right? So that was going on as well.
00:28:26
Speaker
And wouldn't you know it, if you had a little extra cash, you can go catch a play because there was a guy named Billy, better known as William Shakespeare,
00:28:38
Speaker
who was putting on ah quite famous ah you know plays and and you can go catch one of those. So interesting times, maybe most relevant for what we are discussing in this lesson and in this course.
Evolution of Experimentation in Europe
00:28:58
Speaker
at least for it this unit, is the shift that was more so conceptual and linguistic. So before this time period, the meaning of the word experiment had more to do with, you know, trying something out, and seeing how it feels.
00:29:19
Speaker
In fact, if you go to some Latin American countries, like maybe Colombia, or you can just read ah books by Colombian authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you'll see that they actually still use the word experiment like this. you know If you wanna try something out, you say, voy a experimentar.
00:29:42
Speaker
So that is in some places still the way the word is used. But in Western Europe, There was a new use of this same word and it started in specialized circles and groups of what we would today call experimentalists.
00:30:05
Speaker
And for them, an experiment meant this, a concertedly artificial manipulation often using special instruments and designed to probe hidden causes.
00:30:22
Speaker
Of course, this is none other than the more modern notion of a scientific experiment. And this began way back in the late 1500s and was in full swing by the early sixteen hundreds So This is one other thing that you might have been aware of if you are around in this time period.
00:30:49
Speaker
Well, this is where we bring in a person of interest, someone that is definitely influential in this whole affair.
Francis Bacon & the Scientific Method
00:30:59
Speaker
His name was Francis Bacon. Now, he was a man who wore many hats, as you can tell in this image.
00:31:09
Speaker
ah But we are going to focus, of course, on his philosophical endeavors. And he is, if you can... you want to just like a baseball card maybe the most important thing that he did is he developed or codified what we might today refer to as the scientific method and so that is what we're going to talk about let's dive into what mr. Francis Bacon accomplished so as I mentioned ah he wore many hats so he was a successful politician
00:31:45
Speaker
by the year 1600. But that's not, you know, if you want to say that's not where his heart was. He wanted to reinvent how we inquire, how we figure out what's true.
00:32:01
Speaker
And well, for that reason, he had to do battle against what counted as common sense in that time period. So among the many things that he had to do battle with, he had to fight against the Aristotelian worldview.
00:32:18
Speaker
He also had to fight this inclination to blend natural philosophy or what we would today call science with religion. People were doing that kind of a blending thing. They were kind of a little sloppy about it. So they were just kind of combining these two things.
00:32:37
Speaker
And Bacon said, let's not do that. That's not a good idea. Bacon also battled against the authority of tradition and quote unquote common sense.
00:32:52
Speaker
And of course, the belief that reason alone could uncover nature's laws. In other words, he was saying, hey, we should probably look at experiments and rely on them to figure out what's what.
00:33:08
Speaker
Another thing I should mention here very briefly is that he rediscovered the ancient philosophy of the pre-Socratics. There was a man named Democritus.
00:33:21
Speaker
And Democritus believed in a kind of atomism, the view that everything that we see in this world is made out of atoms. Now, it's not exactly the kind of atomism that we believe in today.
00:33:39
Speaker
ah But it's, ah you know, it's on the way, right? So it was, for Bacon, a step toward what we would today think of as a, you know, modern scientific worldview.
00:33:53
Speaker
Well, let's narrow in on a specific point. ah idea or set of ideas from Bacon, which he put forward in his 1605 book, The Advancement of Learning.
00:34:09
Speaker
He thought that we have to be careful of you know, I guess we can call this in general biased reasoning, but he called it idols, right? So there are idols in our minds and they're not good. They're misleading us.
00:34:28
Speaker
They are not letting us pursue the truth. They are you know sort of taking us away from the truth in some cases. And he basically thought, you know you can't you can't think this way. It will you know lead to error.
00:34:43
Speaker
So what are some of these potential biases? Idols of the tribe, i kind of like this one because it's still very, very relevant. All of these are relevant, but human hardwiring.
00:34:56
Speaker
There just are certain intuitions, what we might call heuristics to the human mind, sort of rules of thumb. And they maybe so often work, but they don't always work. So we have to be very aware of them.
00:35:14
Speaker
Otherwise, we will be misled. Idols of the cave is the next thing we have to watch out for. These are our personal biases. So if you are, oh, what's an example that we just gave? Maybe you're pro-Catholic.
00:35:29
Speaker
Well, that might mean that if you hear anything that is pro-Protestant, you might automatically you know not take it very seriously.
00:35:41
Speaker
So, you know, because of your personal beliefs, you don't even look at data and evidence and information in an objective way.
00:35:52
Speaker
Also, there are the idols of the marketplace. So sometimes we hear things, especially in politics, and you kind of hear it over and over and over again.
00:36:05
Speaker
And you kind of just get used to the idea that maybe maybe it's true. And so you repeat these things, even though you don't actually have good evidence for these.
00:36:16
Speaker
Got to watch out for that too. Idols of the theater is the final one. And those are inherited philosophical dogmas like the Aristotelian worldview.
00:36:31
Speaker
You have to once in a while question your philosophical assumptions. If you don't, they are dogmas and you know maybe you don't actually have good reasons for believing them.
00:36:45
Speaker
And so after Bacon thought long and hard about how it is that we should inquire, and he tried to get rid of all the idols in his mind, he came to a conclusion.
00:36:58
Speaker
Bacon said, To know something, what it means to know something is to have the ability to make it or control it.
Bacon's Knowledge and Modern Science
00:37:13
Speaker
If this sounds like modern science to you or a little bit like it, then you are definitely on the way to understanding the views of Mr. Bacon.
00:37:25
Speaker
Predict and control. If you can do these things, that's what it means to have knowledge. Well, predicting and controlling, that's what the early experimentalists were doing.
00:37:41
Speaker
Here we have someone performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I. And well, the experimentalists knew you know what compounds to make. like What do I have to mix with what to create a you know a different ah color fire, for example.
00:38:02
Speaker
And so that's the whole idea behind experimentalism, figure out what does what by just trying it out and seeing if you could if you can understand the the natures of certain elements. Now, experimentalists before Bacon were kind of weird. i actually like to think about them as like today, if you have a friend that's really into magic,
00:38:30
Speaker
I do, or I did. And he, you know, I i love the guy, but he he, during that stage of his life, he was kind of weird. He was always trying to get you to, you know, watch a magic trick, watch him perform a magic trick.
00:38:46
Speaker
And he would spend a lot of his money on his, you I don't know, some apparatus to do particular magic trick. And that's exactly what the experimentalists from the 1500s were doing. They would actually get criticized because they would they would spend their fortunes on their research and they would ignore their familial duties, right? they you know I don't know, they would miss their friend's wedding because they're over here trying to measure any clips or whatever, you know?
00:39:20
Speaker
And so generally speaking, the experimentalists were seen as oddballs, as kind of quirky. And yeah, and some people actually did call them magicians.
00:39:33
Speaker
But the experimentalists loved Francis Bacon because what is he doing, right? He's providing ah justification for basically the way they've chosen to live their life.
00:39:48
Speaker
And it's very telling, right? There was sort of a subculture going on here because what did Bacon call his new applied science?
00:40:00
Speaker
Ah, he called it magic. All right, we'll get into Bacon's view next. Music
00:40:50
Speaker
Let's recap real quick. Where do we stand? Well, the Aristotelian worldview is starting to crumble.
00:41:03
Speaker
There is this interesting group of eccentric outliers that we are calling the early experimentalists.
00:41:17
Speaker
And there was really no science yet. If anything like science were to arise, you needed a method or an identity.
00:41:31
Speaker
And that is exactly what Francis Bacon provided, or at least the blueprint of a method. And what Bacon did was he replaced the idea of certainty that was found in the Aristotelian worldview and put in its place the idea of progress that Through repeated observations, a community of practitioners could over time begin to understand nature.
00:42:09
Speaker
Bacon also replaced quote unquote common sense with experiment. And that is very important because he had to fight against authority under the thing that he yeah he replaced. In its place, he put a form of collective inquiry, right? It isn't that everyone alone is out there trying to understand the world for themselves, but rather we collect data
00:42:41
Speaker
and bring it together so that as a group, we can understand reality, right? We have intellectual communities. That is the approach that Bacon was pushing for.
00:42:56
Speaker
And by the way, he did give us an early model of what might be called an academic society.
00:43:07
Speaker
Well, what we're going to do in this next part of the lesson is we're going to explain ah how he did this through his ah various philosophical ideas, Francis Bacon of course, and we're also going to tie Bacon's views to a problem that we explored in the last lesson. I am speaking of none other than the regress problem.
00:43:35
Speaker
And this regress problem is going to stay with us, right? So let's go ahead and call it dilemma number one. How do we solve the regress? Bacon will be the first person that will be offering a solution for us.
00:43:51
Speaker
And we will cover that today. So let's go over some important
Empiricism vs. Tradition
00:43:58
Speaker
concepts. And we're going to go ahead and start with empiricism.
00:44:03
Speaker
Empiricism is the view that knowledge is rooted in experience and observation. So this directly goes against the views that were held in the Aristotelian worldview, right? The central doctrines of the Aristotelian worldview.
00:44:23
Speaker
Because, you know, it was all about ah older is better and through pure reason we can seek to understand things, right?
00:44:34
Speaker
In some parts of the Middle Ages, they if they wanted to understand reality, All you needed to do is look at scripture and apply some logic and presto pasta, you got what you need.
00:44:47
Speaker
That is so not empiricism. For an empiricist, the starting point is investigating the world, right? So you're building knowledge bit by bit.
00:45:01
Speaker
Fun fact and sidebar, Aristotle was empiricist. Now, I mentioned in the first half of the lesson that what we are today calling the Aristotelian worldview is not exactly what Aristotle believed because Aristotle, again, around in the fourth century BCE, he said what he said and he was immensely influential, so much so that the church, when it took over in the Dark Ages,
00:45:39
Speaker
basically wanted to use Aristotle's intellectual clout and kind of had him as a figurehead. But his views were expanded upon and modified.
00:45:53
Speaker
Even though Aristotle had no idea about Christianity because he was around centuries before it came about, ah his views were were fused in there with medieval Christian theology and biblical commentary.
00:46:10
Speaker
which was all the rage during the Middle Ages. And so what we today call, or what we are in this lesson calling the Aristotelian worldview or Aristotelianism for short, well, that was just not,
00:46:26
Speaker
what he believed. It was, it had some chunks that Aristotle believed, but by the time period we are studying, Aristotelianism had become more so text-based, right? It wasn't experimental.
00:46:42
Speaker
ah Not that Aristotle really performed experiments. If he were around today, he would have been a biologist, but it was less, you know, I guess maybe this next bullet point is a great one to make the difference very clear. it wasn't authority driven, right? Aristotle thought that observation mattered.
00:47:02
Speaker
and this aspect of his philosophy became less emphasized over time, especially as he became as his ideas became Christianized.
00:47:13
Speaker
Aristotle, of course, did focus on purposes, but maybe not exclusively, right? So this is sort of a different emphasis here as well. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, Aristotle thought that observations matter. So if you saw an observation ah that conflicted with an existing theory, maybe you need to reconsider that theory.
00:47:39
Speaker
So he was much more modern. than Aristotle was than what we are calling the Aristotelian worldview. But I had already mentioned that. I want to reiterate that though. It is important to that Aristotle, the man, and and his views are different from passed as the Aristotelian worldview in the, let's just say, you know, Middle Ages through the fifteen hundreds So, wanted to make that quick mention there, Aristotle was an empiricist, as was Bacon.
Practical Truth: Proto-Pragmatism and Positivism
00:48:16
Speaker
Bacon, though, also seemed to endorse something like pragmatism.
00:48:23
Speaker
Pragmatism is a view that abstract concepts like truth or value, these are just tools for thinking. and they are to be evaluated based on how useful they are. So what does that mean?
00:48:37
Speaker
You know, some people think of truth like a capital T truth and um you know, you want to get to it and and there's a method for it and Bacon says, well, you know, the idea of truth, you know, we have one idea and we have that idea because it's a useful tool for thinking.
00:48:56
Speaker
And as soon as we find something more useful, well, then we should adopt those new ones, right? Don't cling to tradition for the sake of tradition.
00:49:09
Speaker
you know, the the idea of truth that we should keep is just the most useful one we've come up with. And so the way that you can kind of maybe kind of maybe already tell, the way that he's going to argue against the Aristotelian worldview is that, hey, you know, i think we have a new, better way for thinking about truth.
00:49:35
Speaker
And so if that is the case, Bacon is sort of like a proto-pragmatist. Now, pragmatism really took off in the 20th century.
00:49:46
Speaker
So we can't just, you know, call him a pragmatist, but we can say he's proto-pragmatist, right? He's in that same flavor and that's that's sort of um ethos of the pragmatists, right? And I'll give you some examples here.
00:50:02
Speaker
For Bacon, an idea is valuable if it predicts, controls, or reveals patterns. right An idea is not valuable just because it's old. It has to do stuff. right So this is where this idea that knowledge is power.
00:50:22
Speaker
Knowledge is the power to predict, control to inquire into hidden causes, to understand. And so that is very important for Francis Bacon.
00:50:38
Speaker
Knowledge, by the way, Bacon believed, is for the relief of human suffering. Whereas in the Aristotelian worldview, that's not really something that is emphasized very much. But for Bacon, you know, the reason why we should look into reality is to make the lives of regular people better.
00:51:00
Speaker
And the way we do that is we predict, we figure out what's hurting them, right? And then we control, we try to get that away from them. So that is another very important reason that, you know, it seems like Bacon has some pragmatist ideas, right? That's exactly what in the 20th century, the pragmatists were saying.
00:51:24
Speaker
Also very important and very much in the pragmatist vein is that Bacon thought that inquiry is a collective practice, right?
00:51:36
Speaker
It's something that we engage in as a community, like in an academic society, right? And so Francis Bacon here very much viewing knowledge as the product of a process much like the pragmatists of the 20th century.
00:51:57
Speaker
And I'll give you one more. We gotta test our ideas, right? We need to successfully manipulate and test our idea or whatever it is that we're studying, we have to be able to successfully control it or manipulate it, not to be looking for its essences, right? And the fire rises, air rises. That's not what experimentation should be based on.
00:52:25
Speaker
truth doesn't i come down to a particular essence that a thing has, but how it behaves when we come up with really, you know, contrived experiments to test it.
00:52:38
Speaker
Right. So that is also very a pragmatist. One more key idea of Francis Bacon, which again is very ahead of its time, is positivism.
00:52:54
Speaker
Positivism is a philosophical tradition that states, among other things, that only empirically verifiable statements have meaning or maybe only empirically verifiable statements matter.
00:53:11
Speaker
You should really focus on what you can measure. So one very famous example of a positivist group is the Vienna Circle, again from the 20th century.
00:53:26
Speaker
And they argued basically that some claims, for example, claims about the existence of God, they're not even false. They're actually meaningless.
00:53:37
Speaker
You can't test your ideas about God's existence or the existence of a soul, or the one that a soul that ah lives after you die.
00:53:48
Speaker
You can't test any of your claims about that. So they are just kind of pointless, right? Pseudo problems. You shouldn't focus on things that you can't test or measure.
00:53:58
Speaker
You should only focus on that which is empirically verifiable. You can check it somehow. And so that is positivism. ah Bacon, you know, not exactly a positivist in the strict meaning of the term because positivism officially came about with Auguste Comte.
00:54:22
Speaker
But he definitely had, again, proto-positivist attitudes. So he was not very fond of metaphysics and speculative speculative philosophy.
00:54:35
Speaker
Because these are subfields of philosophy that, you know, have sort of perennial problems. Like you can't, solve these he just kind of keeps sticking around the same problem for thousands of years sometimes and so he said well if it's like that you know and there seems to be no empirical way to resolve this conflict and that's probably not what we should be spending our time on as far as i know bacon didn't say it's meaningless that would come again the 20th century
00:55:11
Speaker
But he didn't like it, right? And so that's very much in the spirit ah of positivism. And again, he had a preference for that which you can observe, that which you can measure.
00:55:26
Speaker
right So that is very positivist indeed. He didn't like teleological explanations, right so moving away from the Aristotelian worldview.
00:55:38
Speaker
And um he didn't like this idea that um just like the positivists from the 20th century, that you can sort of sequester and make it so that knowledge is full only for the privileged few, right? The Vienna Circle believed that knowledge had a you know a democratic quality to it. It was linked...
00:56:04
Speaker
with democracy and so bacon you know you can definitely see that in wanting to take uh the authority of a regarding knowledge away from the church and you know place it in the hands of a community that way knowledge is not only cumulative but also transparent right you can ask people hey Why do you think this about this particular chemical property? What kind of experiments did you run? And the other person will say, well, here's what I did and you can try it too. so
00:56:40
Speaker
That is definitely a key positivist idea and something that Bacon clearly was was on to. Okay, so there you have Francis Bacon.
00:56:52
Speaker
He was ah in the empiricist tradition and a proto-pragmatist and a proto-positivist. How does this affect the regress problem? What does any of this have to do with arguing in response, i arguing a rebuttal to the regress argument?
00:57:17
Speaker
Well, let me tell you. And basically it starts by just kind of like, you know, eliminating the premises here, a couple of the premises. Let me get rid of this here. All right. So here's the basic idea.
00:57:31
Speaker
If you look through this argument, you can see aspects of it that a rhyme or are based on the JTB theory of knowledge. And that's no secret. This whole way of arguing is a response to the JTB theory of knowledge.
00:57:50
Speaker
It's a way to undermine this JTB theory of knowledge. But Francis Bacon was clearly not having any of the JTB theory of knowledge.
00:58:03
Speaker
His whole idea of knowledge was radically different. Knowledge isn't justified true belief. Knowledge is power.
00:58:14
Speaker
Knowledge is the capacity to predict and control, right? To make something, to manipulate the natural world in some way. And so once you realize that that is Bacon's definition of knowledge, this argument simply is no longer valid, right? So let's, ah let's do, I mean, we can look at a couple of premises here. Let's look at the second one.
00:58:42
Speaker
good reasons are themselves justified beliefs. ah No, the good reasons for why you believe something have to do with observation, not other justified beliefs.
00:59:01
Speaker
And so let's go over here to, you know, premise six, right? Knowledge just is justify a true belief. No, knowledge is the power to control, to manipulate, to predict, right? To to have some information and be able to use it in practice.
00:59:21
Speaker
So once you see that Bacon has changed the definition of knowledge, you know, leaving the Aristotelian worldview behind and beginning to usher in the modern approach to science, this argument, this regress attack on knowledge no longer works.
00:59:45
Speaker
That is the whole idea. Now, of course, you can maybe generate a new skeptical argument, this time against Bacon's version of knowledge.
00:59:58
Speaker
And hey, we'll do that in a second. But let's just take stock for the moment. What is knowledge? There is at least two ways you can define knowledge so far.
01:00:10
Speaker
There is the Platonic account, or maybe Plato didn't believe it, but a ah view that Plato mentioned, the JTB theory of knowledge.
01:00:25
Speaker
And there is also Bacon's, let's call it the knowledge is power theory. All right, so those are the two views so far as to what knowledge is.
01:00:42
Speaker
Okay, well, that's some pretty good progress. And maybe you like ah Francis Bacon's theory already. You're saying, oh, there you go. The regress is toast. Just so that we can keep playing the game of this course. Let me give you a problem for Bacon's views.
Critiques of Bacon's Knowledge Theory
01:01:03
Speaker
Now it is the case that we're treating them as a unit, this proto-pragmatism and proto-positivism and empiricism.
01:01:14
Speaker
So if knowledge is power, then here is a pickle.
01:01:24
Speaker
We can imagine a theory that has predictive power right For example, the power to predict the occurrence of a particular natural phenomenon accurately. um And it can even have explanatory power, this theory, right?
01:01:43
Speaker
That is the capacity to explain why something occurs in a certain way, right? Why phenomena occur the way that they do. And yet you could still be,
01:01:55
Speaker
in fact completely inaccurate and wrong. Okay, so again, a theory can have predictive and explanatory power and yet still be way off the mark.
01:02:10
Speaker
Well, the example that I'll give you is the Ptolemaic system, the geocentric model that Ptolemy argued for. We can also talk about some other ones, but let's just talk about this right here.
01:02:25
Speaker
Now, Ptolemy was around a few centuries after Aristotle, and he basically figured out how to map the movement, movements of the planets so that you can basically tell where they are.
01:02:42
Speaker
And the crazy thing about the Ptolemaic model is that in a sense, it worked. I mean, no, not even in a sense. No, it you can predict where a planet would be based off the Ptolemaic model.
01:03:00
Speaker
And so, yeah, there was predictive power. And you'll recall earlier in the lesson, i lovingly laid out the Aristotelian worldview. There's also explanatory power. Like why do the planets move like this?
01:03:20
Speaker
Well, because there's ether beyond the moon. and ether moves in circles and so that's why the planets move in these circular motions, right? So the Ptolemaic system, it wasn't, you know, a bunch of ah cycle babble.
01:03:42
Speaker
Like it could predict where a planet would be and it had explanatory power. What's wrong with this system?
01:03:53
Speaker
You might say, well, it's not actually true. yeah but that's not what Bacon is focusing on now, is it? Bacon says you have knowledge if you can apply that information in practice, if you can do something with it.
01:04:10
Speaker
And guess what? Ptolemy did do something with his information. He could predict that. where a planet would be in I don't know, in three months.
01:04:23
Speaker
You could also explain, oh well, this is why it moves like this, because of ether. So if I can sort of nutshell the problem with a potential skeptical argument against the Baconian knowledge is power theory, it's basically this. It's like,
01:04:47
Speaker
Maybe the JTB theory of knowledge had the bar for knowledge way too high so that it's not clear that you can ever actually you know go over it.
01:04:59
Speaker
But maybe Bacon has the bar for knowledge way too low. i mean, it's not entirely clear why the Ptolemaic system isn't knowledge for Francis Bacon.
01:05:17
Speaker
That's not good, right? And I mean, I guess you can say, well, there's empirical findings that didn't jive very well with the Ptolemaic system.
01:05:29
Speaker
But at least until those empirical findings were brought to light, this would count as knowledge. Now, maybe that doesn't bother you.
01:05:41
Speaker
Or maybe it does. So let me give you some food for thought here because it just is a historical fact that all kinds of things are around for a very long time and people treat it as knowledge.
Historical Medical Practices as Knowledge?
01:05:56
Speaker
And, you know, it seems like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is how, you know, the body works, for example.
01:06:02
Speaker
But in retrospect, we're like, oh, my God, you were so off the mark. I shouldn't say, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Gosh, ah they were so off the mark. There's no way that counted as knowledge.
01:06:17
Speaker
Let's talk about bloodletting. Bloodletting was around for a super long time, ah way past... It's usefulness because it was never really all that useful. I mean, I guess it was useful for certain things, but they use it for almost everything, right? And lots and lots of people died because of it with no apparent benefit. There is this awesome book called Bad Medicine. The author's last name is Wooten. I think that's how you pronounce it.
01:06:54
Speaker
Anyway, he basically said that, you know, there's big chunks of time, huge, you know, thousands of years, basically, two millennia, you might even say, where you were better off staying away from the doctor, right? They were causing more harm than good.
01:07:14
Speaker
And a historical figure as late as George Washington was a victim, if you want to call it that, to bloodletting. So George Washington died ah due to complications from bloodletting. So ah this is a terrible, terrible practice.
01:07:35
Speaker
But for a long time, they just couldn't tell that it really wasn't working. And so as far as they knew, they were making things better.
01:07:46
Speaker
And now we know better. But do you want to say that what they were doing was knowledge, right? was a Did a ah ah physician of the, let's just say the 1100s, right? the The late middle ages, would they, would their, you know, the things in their heads, would their beliefs count as knowledge to you?
01:08:10
Speaker
If you don't think so, then it's not clear that knowledge is power is a good enough definition of knowledge, right? Let me give you another one here. Uroscopy. All right, this is going to get gross. I'm sorry.
01:08:26
Speaker
ah But even though today people do give urine samples and there's a function and a purpose to that, In the Middle Ages, for example, uroscopy, you know, was used for a lot of things that it totally didn't work for.
01:08:47
Speaker
So physicians would grab urine samples from people and They would look at you know the color and that how how you know the clarity, right? Is it very cloudy or is it clear?
01:09:04
Speaker
They would even, wait for it, taste it. All right, and based off this information, Maybe they would guess, oh, you know, here's what you have and you should, you know, lay down for a week.
01:09:18
Speaker
And maybe they were right sometimes, but for sure they were wrong other times. For starters, there was no germ theory. So obviously sometimes people were sick from bacteria, for example.
01:09:36
Speaker
And the ah the doctor in question wasn't able to say that. So whatever that person said, they were definitely wrong.
01:09:47
Speaker
right The right answer was bacteria, not whatever else they said. Also, sometimes they would basically try to predict your future.
01:09:59
Speaker
by, you know, via your urine sample. And ah no, that's just, ah I'm not even going to explain why that's not true. That's just not true.
01:10:11
Speaker
And so, uroscopy, not a useful practice, but it lasted for a very long time. And it seemed useful to people, to doctors, right?
01:10:25
Speaker
And so, well, Do you want to count that as knowledge for them? It seems like Bacon would have to. Today we want to look at this and say, what the heck?
01:10:39
Speaker
no that is not medical knowledge right so how do you feel about bacon now maybe you think that you can respond to this criticism or maybe you're saying ah what's the next view tell me the third one okay let's do one more here because uh it's also disgusting Couching for cataracts.
01:11:06
Speaker
So um this didn't work. not Not really, not how we treat cataracts today. Cataracts, if you don't know, is when the the lens gets cloudy.
01:11:20
Speaker
And they would basically cut your lens up and shove it off to the side. And if they didn't blind you, it still didn't really work.
01:11:34
Speaker
And that is 1000% not how cataracts are treated today. So, ah you know, it still is the case that some might ah occasionally go through this procedure and actually see better afterward.
01:11:52
Speaker
Do you want to count that as knowledge? If you are siding with Francis Bacon, well, the surgery was successful.
01:12:04
Speaker
You did reduce someone's suffering. ah your you know Your knowledge is a power to create the ability for someone to see again in a non-cloudy way.
01:12:18
Speaker
So it almost seems like Bacon would have to say, right oh this is a this is knowledge in that particular case. But many people see this in retrospect and say, oh man, i don't wanna count that as medical knowledge.
01:12:35
Speaker
Maybe you do, maybe you don't. What are our options at this point? Well, it looks like we have to keep digging.
01:12:47
Speaker
Maybe we can respond to these objections and defend Francis Bacon Or maybe there's another view that ah we can take on what knowledge is. Or maybe there is yet another way to respond to the regress argument and somehow defend the JTB theory of knowledge.
01:13:12
Speaker
We'll start to look at those other options next time.