Posts Tagged ‘empiricism’
“A prudent question is one-half of wisdom”*…
The death of Queen Elizabeth I created a career opportunity for philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon– one that, as Susan Wise Bauer explains– led him to found empiricism, to pioneer inductive reasoning, and in so doing, to advance the scientific method…
In 1603, Francis Bacon, London born, was forty-three years old: a trained lawyer and amateur philosopher, happily married, politically ambitious, perpetually in debt.
He had served Elizabeth I of England loyally at court, without a great deal of recognition in return. But now Elizabeth was dead at the age of sixty-nine, and her crown would go to her first cousin twice removed: James VI of Scotland, James I of England.
Francis Bacon hoped for better things from the new king, but at the moment he had no particular ‘in’ at the English court. Forced to be patient, he began working on a philosophical project he’d had in mind for some years–a study of human knowledge that he intended to call Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human.
Like most of Bacon’s undertakings, the project was ridiculously ambitious. He set out to classify all learning into the proper branches and lay out all of the possible impediments to understanding. Part I condemned what he called the three ‘distempers’ of learning, which included ‘vain imaginations,’ pursuits such as astrology and alchemy that had no basis in actual fact; Part II divided all knowledge into three branches and suggested that natural philosophy should occupy the prime spot. Science, the project of understanding the universe, was the most important pursuit man could undertake. The study of history (‘everything that has happened’) and poesy (imaginative writings) took definite second and third places.
For a time, Bacon didn’t expand on these ideas. The Advancement of Learning opened with a fulsome dedication to James I (‘I have been touched–yea, and possessed–with an extreme wonder at those your virtues and faculties . . . the largeness of your capacity, the faithfulness of your memory, the swiftness of your apprehension, the penetration of your judgment, and the facility and order of your elocution …. There hath not been since Christ’s time any king or temporal monarch which hath been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human’), and this groveling soon yielded fruit. In 1607 Bacon was appointed as solicitor general, a position he had coveted for years, and over the next decade or so he poured his energies into his government responsibilities.
He did not return to natural philosophy until after his appointment to the even higher post of chancellor in 1618. Now that he had battled his way to the top of the political dirt pile, he announced his intentions to write a work with even greater scope–a new, complete system of philosophy that would shape the minds of men and guide them into new truths. He called this masterwork the Great Instauration: the Great Establishment, a whole new way of thinking, laid out in six parts.
Part I, a survey of the existing ‘ancient arts’ of the mind, repeated the arguments of the Advancement of Learning. But Part II, published in 1620 as a stand-alone work, was something entirely different. It was a wholesale challenge to Aristotelian methods, a brand-new ‘doctrine of a more perfect use of reason.’
Aristotelian thinking relies, heavily, on deductive reasoning for ancient logicians and philosophers, the highest and best road to the truth. Deductive reasoning moves from general statements (premises) to specific conclusions.
MAJOR PREMISE: All heavy matter falls toward the center of the universe. MINOR PREMISE: The earth is made of heavy matter. MINOR PREMISE: The earth is not falling. CONCLUSION: The earth must already be at the center of the universe.
But Bacon had come to believe that deductive reasoning was a dead end that distorted evidence: ‘Having first determined the question according to his will,’ he objected, ‘man then resorts to experience, and bending her to conformity with his placets [expressions of assent], leads her about like a captive in a procession.’ Instead, he argued, the careful thinker must reason the other way around: starting from specifics and building toward general conclusions, beginning with particular pieces of evidence and working, inductively, toward broader assertions.
This new way of thinking–inductive reasoning–had three steps to it. The ‘true method’ Bacon explained,
‘first lights the candle, and then by means of the candle shows the way; commencing as it does with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling or erratic, and from it deducing axioms, and from established axioms again new experiments.’
In other words, the natural philosopher must first come up with an idea about how the world works: ‘lighting the candle.’ Second, he must test the idea against physical reality, against ‘experience duly ordered’–both observations of the world around him and carefully designed experiments. Only then, as a last step, should he ‘deduce axioms,’ coming up with a theory that could be claimed to carry truth.
Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion: Bacon had just traced the outlines of the scientific method…
Francis Bacon and the Scientific Method
An excerpt from The Story of Western Science by @SusanWiseBauer, via the invaluable @delanceyplace.
* Francis Bacon
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As we embrace empiricism, we might send carefully-transmitted birthday greetings to Augusto Righi; he was born on this date in 1850. A physicist and a pioneer in the study of electromagnetism, he showed that showed that radio waves displayed characteristics of light wave behavior (reflection, refraction, polarization, and interference), with which they shared the electromagnetic spectrum. In 1894 Righi was the first person to generate microwaves.
Righi influenced the young Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, who visited him at his lab. Indeed, Marconi invented the first practical wireless telegraphy radio transmitters and receivers in 1894 using Righi’s four ball spark oscillator (from Righi’s microwave work) in his transmitters.
“I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth”*…
From ancient Egyptian cubits to fitness tracker apps, humankind has long been seeking ever more ways to measure the world – and ourselves…
The discipline of measurement developed for millennia… Around 6,000 years ago, the first standardised units were deployed in river valley civilisations such as ancient Egypt, where the cubit was defined by the length of the human arm, from elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and used to measure out the dimensions of the pyramids. In the Middle Ages, the task of regulating measurement to facilitate trade was both privilege and burden for rulers: a means of exercising power over their subjects, but a trigger for unrest if neglected. As the centuries passed, units multiplied, and in 18th-century France there were said to be some 250,000 variant units in use, leading to the revolutionary demand: “One king, one law, one weight and one measure.”
It was this abundance of measures that led to the creation of the metric system by French savants. A unit like the metre – defined originally as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole – was intended not only to simplify metrology, but also to embody political ideals. Its value and authority were derived not from royal bodies, but scientific calculation, and were thus, supposedly, equal and accessible to all. Then as today, units of measurement are designed to create uniformity across time, space and culture; to enable control at a distance and ensure trust between strangers. What has changed since the time of the pyramids is that now they often span the whole globe.
Despite their abundance, international standards like those mandated by NIST and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) are mostly invisible in our lives. Where measurement does intrude is via bureaucracies of various stripes, particularly in education and the workplace. It’s in school that we are first exposed to the harsh lessons of quantification – where we are sorted by grade and rank and number, and told that these are the measures by which our future success will be gauged…
A fascinating survey of the history of measurement, and a consideration of its consequences: “Made to measure: why we can’t stop quantifying our lives,” from James Vincent (@jjvincent) in @guardian, an excerpt from his new book Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement.
And for a look at what it takes to perfect one of the most fundamental of those measures, see Jeremy Bernstein‘s “The Kilogram.”
* “I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.” – Epitaph Johannes Kepler composed for himself a few months before he died
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As we get out the gauge, we might send thoughtfully-wagered birthday greetings Blaise Pascal; he was born on this date in 1623. A French mathematician, physicist, theologian, and inventor (e.g.,the first digital calculator, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe), his commitment to empiricism (“experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against his contemporary René “cogito, ergo sum” Descartes– and was foundational in the acceleration of the scientific/rationalist commitment to measurement…
“One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical”*…
The Building of the Argo, by Antoon Derkinderen, c. 1901. Rijksmuseum.
The thought problem known as the ship of Theseus first appears in Plutarch’s Lives, a series of biographies written in the first century. In one vignette, Theseus, founder-hero of Athens, returns victorious from Crete on a ship that the Athenians went on to preserve.
They took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same…
Of course, the conundrum of how things change and stay the same has been with us a lot longer than Plutarch. Plato, and even pre-Socratics like Heraclitus, dealt in similar questions. “You can’t step in the same river twice,” a sentiment found on inspirational Instagram accounts, is often attributed to Heraclitus. His actual words—“Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow”—might not be the best Instagram fodder but, figuratively at least, provided the waters that the ship of Theseus later sailed.
Two thousand years later the ship is still bobbing along, though some of its parts have been replaced. Now known colloquially as Theseus’ paradox, in the U.S. the idea sometimes appears as “Washington’s ax.” While not as ancient as the six-thousand-year-old stone ax discovered last year at George Washington’s estate, the age-old question remains: If Washington’s ax were to have its handle and blade replaced, would it still be the same ax? The same has been asked of a motley assortment of items around the world. In Hungary, for example, there is a similar fable involving the statesman Kossuth Lajos’ knife, while in France it’s called Jeannot’s knife.
This knife, that knife, Washington’s ax—there’s even a “Lincoln’s ax.” We don’t know where these stories originated. They likely arose spontaneously and had nothing to do with the ancient Greeks and their philosophical conundrums. The only thing uniting these bits of folklore is that the same question was asked: Does a thing remain the same after all its parts are replaced? In the millennia since the ship of Theseus set sail, some notions that bear its name have less in common with the original than do the fables of random axes and knives, while other frames for this same question threaten to replace the original entirely.
One such version of this idea is attributed to Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, proffering his sock as an example. An exhibit called Locke’s Socks at Pace University’s now-defunct Museum of Philosophy serves to demonstrate. On one wall, six socks were hung: the first a cotton sports sock, the last made only of patches. A museum guide, according to a New York Times write-up, asked a room full of schoolchildren, “Assume the six socks represent a person’s sock over time. Can we say that a sock which is finally all patches, with none of the original material, is the same sock?”
The question could be asked of Theseus’ paradox itself. Can it be said that a paradox about a ship remains the same if the ship is replaced with a knife or a sock? Have we lost anything from Theseus’ paradox if instead we start calling it “the Locke’s Sock paradox”?…
Is a paradox still the same after its parts have been replaced? A consideration: “Restoring the Ship of Theseus.”
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As we contemplate change, we might spare a reasoned thought for the Enlightenment giant (and sock darner) John Locke; the physician and philosopher died on this date in 1704. An intellectual descendant of Francis Bacon, Locke was among the first empiricists. He spent over 20 years developing the ideas he published in his most significant work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), an analysis of the nature of human reason which promoted experimentation as the basis of knowledge. Locke established “primary qualities” (e.g., solidity, extension, number) as distinct from “secondary qualities” (sensuous attributes like color or sound). He recognized that science is made possible when the primary qualities, as apprehended, create ideas that faithfully represent reality.
Locke is, of course, also well-remembered as a key developer (with Hobbes, and later Rousseau) of the concept of the Social Contract. Locke’s theory of “natural rights” influenced Voltaire and Rosseau– and formed the intellectual basis of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
“Every technology, every science that tells us more about ourselves, is scary at the time”*…
Further to last weekend’s visit with Silicon Valley’s security robots...
Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that can independently build its own children and test which one does best; and then use the results to inform the design of the next generation, so that preferential traits are passed down from one generation to the next.
Without any human intervention or computer simulation beyond the initial command to build a robot capable of movement, the mother created children constructed of between one and five plastic cubes with a small motor inside.
In each of five separate experiments, the mother designed, built and tested generations of ten children, using the information gathered from one generation to inform the design of the next. The results, reported in the open access journal PLOS One, found that preferential traits were passed down through generations, so that the ‘fittest’ individuals in the last generation performed a set task twice as quickly as the fittest individuals in the first generation…
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“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” said lead researcher Dr Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who worked in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich. “That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species… We want to see robots that are capable of innovation and creativity…”
See and read more here (and here).
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As we select naturally, we might spare a thought for Blaise Pascal; he died on this date in 1662. A French mathematician, physicist, theologian, and inventor (e.g.,the first digital calculator, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe), his commitment to empiricism (“experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against his contemporary René “cogito, ergo sum” Descartes…
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