Dr. Zubkov

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is the philosopher often credited as the first philosopher of science, in its modern sense. His groundbreaking work, The New Organon (1620), proposed a new method of inductive reasoning, intended as a replacement to Aristotle’s Organon, heretofore unchallenged in Europe. Baconian method was perhaps a development of Avicenna’s method described in his Canon of Medicine (1025), and was further developed into Mill’s Method by John Stuart Mill in his System of Logic (1843). Its main idea was that it is possible to identify casuality by corroborating evidence. If a phenomenon can be observed in presence of a factor and cannot be observed in its absense, the factor is one of the causes of the phenomenon.

Besides his inductive reasoning, Bacon is also famous for his concept of the Idols of the Mind, the obstacles that hinder scientific reasoning: appeal to authority, such as religion or philosophy (idola theatri), inadequacies and misuse of the language, confusion of terms (idola fori), individual human failures, likes, and dislikes, such as racism (idola specus), and the preconceived notions of the human race, such as anthropomorphism (idola tribus). Bacon’s ideas directly influenced Thomas Browne who applied them in his grand work Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors, the refutation of errors and superstitions of the age, which was a bestseller until it became obsolete by the time of Newton.

Even though inductive reasoning in general and the usefulness of corroborating evidence in particular faded out of the limelight of the philosophy of science by 20th century, the system of scientific empiricism, which grew from Francis Bacon’s works to be explicitly formulated by John Locke (1632 – 1704) and further developed by George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) and David Hume (1711-1776), greatly helped to shape up science and to separate it from superstition and religion and laid the ground work for the philosophies of both verificationism and pragmatism. Despite being opposed by Rationalism, Empiricism endured, and, in the works of Immanuel Kant, merged with it to give rise for a new generation of philosophies of science.

Under Empiricism, scientific knowledge is any knowledge based on empirical evidence, i.e. the evidence that is observable by the senses.