Chapter 14: The Early Empiricists:
Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes
Bacon’s Task: The Reconstruction of All
Knowledge

Two themes that were typical of the Renaissance

A radical criticism of the past regarding the contents and methods
of Medieval knowledge: The contents and methods of the past
were
 God-centered, not human centered: It focused on how reality
works from a theological perspective, not on how reality
(nature) works so that humans can gain useful and applicable
science and technology for the betterment of human life on
Earth
 Not trustworthy because Medieval knowledge was largely based
on revelation/scripture, which needed to be accessed first and
foremost through faith
 Not useful practically in terms of solving worldly problems
Bacon’s Task: The Reconstruction of All
Knowledge
 Optimism concerning the future regarding the contents
and methods of knowledge

Human-centered: the goal is the acquisition of useful and
applicable theoretical knowledge of how reality works so that it can
be used, manipulated, controlled for our benefit

The right method of knowing will lead us into utopias—social,
political, economic etc

The new science is comparatively trustworthy, for it is an empirical
method of studying empirical reality

“Knowledge is power!”: Knowledge is utilitarian: We can master
and possess nature
Bacon’s Task: The Reconstruction of All
Knowledge

The separation of reason and faith, philosophy and
theology: the proper use of reason is not to understand
and to articulate rationally what faith intuitively and nonrationally understands. The proper use of reason is to
gain useful knowledge about this world/reality

The rise of non-teleological science: natural science is the
study of the material, efficient, and formal causes of the
universe of observable effects that are nature. The
emphasis is no longer on why something exists, but on
what it is (material and formal cause) and how it exists
(efficient cause).
The Route to Knowledge: From Idols to
Induction

The corruption of the mind: The way (method) to resurrect
ourselves from our fallen nature (from our fall from the grace
of God and the gracious and enchanted life in the Garden of
Eden) and to restore our “dominion” over nature is to cleans
the mind of its corrupted methods of knowing


The myth of progress in the modern world is grounded on and
sanctioned by a belief that we are doing a sacred and holy task when
we master and possess, dominate and subjugate nature through
science and technology
Restoration of the mind’s original condition: The 4 idols that
corrupt our mind (the allusion here is to the Judeo-Christian
prohibition against “idolatry” in the 10 commandments
The Route to Knowledge: From Idols to
Induction
 The idols of the tribe: This refers to the innate and inherent
tendency of human beings to anthropomorphize their world by
transferring our wants and likes onto nature.
 Example: teleological explanations are really simply
anthropomorphisms: we interpret the existence and nature as
being a purposeful thing, when in fact it is just a blind and
chance occurrence: the lamb does not exist for the lion to eat
 The idols of the cave: This is essentially a complaint against
relativism and the unacknowledged social construction of our
understanding of nature/reality: we are limited by our socialhistorical conditioning. What is needed is to recognize this and
to break free of it: this is to be accomplished through a healthy
sense of skepticism
The Route to Knowledge: From Idols to
Induction
 The idols of the marketplace (of language/communication):


Problem: We have language (words, symbols, concepts, theories)
for things that don’t exist either concretely or verifiably. Solution:
adopt a position of nominalism: do not assume that words imply
that something actually exists

Problem: Words have different meanings (equivocation). Solution:
Beware of equivocations.
The idols of the theater: The philosophical systems of the past
(but also the works of mythology and religion) are like plays in a
theatre: they are largely fictional, and are fictions of the desire to
know while not actually amounting to knowledge
Bacon’s Inductive Method
 Bacon refuses the deductive-syllogistic method of Aristotle as
a method of knowing.

Distinction between deductive and inductive inferences

An inference: the pattern of thinking the mind follows/carries out when
processing information to make knowledge claims

Deductive: General-specific—specific conclusion

Induction: Specific data—general conclusion
 The problem: The problem is that the warrants (major premises) that are used to
subsume data claims are themselves not given in their truth-value. Rather, they are
derived through inductions. So, both the warrants and data of deductions are based
on inductions.
Bacon’s Inductive Method
 The Solution: The solution is to refine the method of
induction

The refined method: make generalizations on the basis of standard
“tables of inquiry”:
• Collection of Data
 The Table of Essence and Presence: List all relevant instances of the
object of knowledge
 The Table of Deviation or Absence in Proximity: List all relevant
instances of the opposite of the object of knowledge
 The Table of Degrees or Comparison: Distinguish between kinds of
objects and degrees of objects
• The Process of Induction
 We make a refined generalization about the object of knowledge
 The knowledge induced from the object is the “objective” form, or
scientific law, of the object: it is that about the object that is
permanent
Bacon’s Scientific Humanism
 Induction is the “Machine,” or mechanism, that will restore
a fallen humanity to its rightful place in the Garden of
Eden:

We can make the ideal of paradise real on earth: We can
actualize our godly potential if we use our minds in the right
way—we must think inductively!

The Baconian Protestant Reformation (on analogy with the
Protestant Reformation of Luther): just as every believer has
direct access to God through their own interiority (individual
faith), every scientist has direct access to God’s laws of nature
through their own interiority, which is the reformed process of
their own thinking
Bacon’s Scientific Humanism
 The scientific reformationist “work ethic” will diligently and rigorously be
able to read God’s mind by inductively finding the laws of nature.
Induction is God’s redeeming gift to humankind, and by using the gift that
God gave to us, we do God’s bidding and our work becomes a holy
mission. Humankind is thereby charged with a mission from God: get
back to the Garden by ourselves and through ourselves via the
reformation of our own thinking.
 We will win re-admittance to the Garden of Eden by transforming first
ourselves and then nature: if we change the way we think, then we will
change what we do and who we are: We can sanctify ourselves and
our world through the good work of science
Evaluation and Significance of Bacon

Bacon’s accomplishment is philosophical rather than
scientific. He did not invent anything noteworthy
scientifically. So he’s not a noteworthy scientist. Rather, he’s
a philosopher of science who sought to clarify for the first time
in the modern world the inductive and empirical method of
science. With this philosophical step, science advances into its
modern methodology and practice as being non-teleological,
self-reflectively critical (through the disavowal of traditional
idols of knowledge) as well as being rigorously empirical and
inductive.

As a philosopher, Bacon clarifies and cultivates a modern,
humanistic, autonomous and progressive scientific and
cultural mindset that continues to this day. Because of this, it
is relatively accurate to say that we live in a Baconian world.
Hobbes’s Task: Making Physics Sovereign
in Philosophy
 To reform the natural and social sciences in terms of both
method and content in terms of the following “new” and
“modern” operative assumptions

Methodological assumption:
 Reduce the multiplicity of phenomena to the simplest possible
laws and elements (the use of Ockham’s “razor”)
• The model of this reduction is to be found in physics, where the best
theory is the theory that is simplest and explains the most
 the theoretical goal is simplicity and explanatory power.
 The practical goal is applicability: paradisal progress
Hobbes’s Task: Making Physics Sovereign
in Philosophy

Epistemological assumption: Empiricism: all of our knowledge comes through the senses

Metaphysical/ontological assumption: Mechanistic Materialism: reality is nothing but
matter in mechanical motion
 The popular notion of materialism
 The technical & philosophical notion of materialism:
• All things/entities/beings are reducible to matter & motion in a spatialtemporal nexus: Reality is matter and force: material and efficient
causes/effects (with no teleological causes and a disavowal of Platonic forms
and/or innate ideas)
• All things happen according to a finite set of fixed physical laws
 Example: Newtonian physics
• Complete causal determinism: everything in nature and human affairs is
caused in such a way that it could not be otherwise
• Historical lineage: Democritus—(Aristotle)—Epicurus— Lucretius—
(Bacon)—Galileo—Hobbes—Newton—Le Mettrie—Hume—Darwin—
Marx/Engels—(Nietzsche)—Skinner—Smart: Modern Behaviorism
(Eliminative Materialism)
Hobbes’s Task: Making Physics Sovereign
in Philosophy
 Chief results:
God does not exist (unless God is a material event—but then this is
not what most people understand by the word “God”)
 There is no teleology to the material universe: There is no purpose,
goal, final cause to the universe or any entity within it: there is no
answer to the question “Why?” anything exists—only answers to What
(material cause) exists and How it exists (efficient—forces/processes).
 Chance, understood as arbitrariness and purposelessness, is the
nature of reality: nothing happens for any purposeful reason.
Everything is a result of blind mechanical “chance”: Motto: Shit
happens!
 Yet, everything in the universe is causally determined in a
necessary (it could not have been otherwise!) chain of material and
efficient causes: everything whatsoever is the outcome/effect of a
series of prior material/efficient causes: every event is exhaustively
pre-determined

The Physics of Knowledge
 A brief overview of Hobbes’s materialistic understanding of
human nature
Human being is a machine: All human activity can be understood
physicalistically as the natural behavior of matter according to
material and efficient mechanical laws.
 The so-called mind can be reduced to the brain, and thinking and
acting can be reduced to biochemical brain states and stimulusresponse reactions.
 Thus, thinking, knowing, believing and acting are merely complex
forms of physical activity of an anatomical (matter) and physiological
(process) machine
 Furthermore, since the laws of physics are universal, there can be no
such thing as free will.
 If everything is material, there can be no such thing as an immaterial
soul

The Physics of Knowledge
 Psychological events (brain=mindsoul)
 How perception and thinking work
 External matter hits the material anatomical-physiological
apparatus’s of physical perception (the senses): For example,
light waves strike our eyes.
 These waves trigger a Billiard ball-like sequence of events
neurologically
 This sequence of events is called linguistically “color,” but color
itself does not exist either in the mind or in reality. What really
exists is a sequence of events.
• The notion of phenomenality: Phenomenal qualities do not exist
externally in the object of perception nor internally in us. Rather,
what is really happening in the “perception of the color red” is the
mechanistic motion of particles colliding in certain ways that
produce the experience of red relative to our particular anatomyphysiology.
The Physics of Knowledge
 Verbal events
 There are basically three different ways to think about the
existence of verbal events. Either language refers to things that
are real, ideal, or nominal
 Realism maintains that language refers to things that actually
exist: Things are mind-independent: They are Out There
 Conceptualism maintains that language refers to things that are
mind dependent: Things are meanings in our minds: Things are
meanings in here, i.e., in concsiousness
 Nominalism maintains that language refers to things that
neither exist “out there” nor “in here” but only within a
linguistic system: Things/ideas are language dependent:
Things/ideas are merely words (linguistic devises) on the
chessboard of language
The Physics of Knowledge
 Verbal events
 Hobbesian nominalism:
 Words are physicalistic-neurological events (materialism) that
happen in the form of phonetic gestures (utterances) that stand
for (denote and connote) sensations (empiricism)

The relations between words correspond to the relations
between physicalistic events
• For example: Words such as “red” do not refer to things that actually
exist that are red. Nor does the idea “red” exist in our mind. Rather,
the word is merely a physical event that is causally determined to
happen
The Physics of Knowledge
 Verbal events
 Hobbesian nominalistic knowledge
 Language usage and thinking do not inform us about the world that
exist either externally “out there” or internally “in here.” Rather,
language only gives us a representational picture of was is actually a
physicalistic event, and this linguistic event is also only a highly
“evolved” (Darwin) physicalistic event that points to other events

As a result, all knowledge is representational: Knowledge does not
tell us about reality, it only tells us about how reality appears to u.
As a result, reason (abstract rational thinking) is essentially
divorced from reality: Reason can only make “pictures” of reality
• The result of mechanistic materialism and empiricism: reason alone
cannot give us knowledge about reality as it really is, for both reason and
language are simply an “epiphenomenona” of physicalistic brains states
• Conclusion and chief assumption for modern science: Only natural,
empirical, mechanistic material science can tell us accurately about
reality
The Physics of Knowledge
 Hobbesian nominalistic knowledge

Some general problems with this position (and any like it)
• First, although it explains reality empirically, materially,
mechanistically, and representationally, in doing so it fails to allow
us to understand the meaning of material existence/mode of
existence:
 when looking at the brain, the scientist never sees the experience
of “red”; rather, s/he sees only pictures of neuronal activity, and if
s/he looks at the brain itself, s/he sees brain tissue, blood, cells,
nerves, chemicals and so on.
 Example: Neurotheology: A natural scientific representation of
religious brain-states does not allow us to understand the
existential meaning of these brains states for the people who
experience them. The same could be said of all human emotions
and rational capacities: explaining scientifically what and how the
brain works does not reveal the meaning of existence in terms of
why we exist
Metaphysics: All Motion is Determined
 Ethics is reduced to behaviorism

Morality and ethics are reducible to psycho-physical
causal/deterministic events: there is no right and wrong, only
causal occurrences that are experienced as pleasurable and
painful events. What we call right and wrong are misplaced
abstractions that do not accurately represent the truth of what
is happening at the material level of reality: The “good” is what
feels good, and what feels good is a causally determined
sequence of events. The “bad” is what feels bad
Metaphysics: All Motion is Determined
 Political motions/events
 Theoretical Program: Hobbes seeks to provide a mechanisticmaterialistic explanation of political society & government

The State of Nature: Nature is a war of all against all: survival of
the fittest: Eat or be eaten: everybody has equal right to
everything: Might makes right; freedom=power
• Consequently, we exist is a constant state of fear of loss of property
and life
Metaphysics: All Motion is Determined
 Political motions/events
 Natural Laws
 The law of nature is survival of the fittest
 In order to survive, we must form groups and coalitions for
protection and sustenance
 In order to form groups and coalitions, we must give up our
individual autonomy and rights to everything: we must
voluntarily limit our rights
• The motivation for this is not altruism, but egoism: its what’s good
for me

To insure protection of one’s rights, and to insure that others
will remain within their limits, a third coercive and punishing
body must be formed: government—the Leviathan
Metaphysics: All Motion is Determined
 Political motions/events
 Social Contract Theory: Government is a contract among
individual constituents that is created for the sake of individual
survival

Government is not instituted by God, nor is it sanctioned by
God, nor is it in any way a gift from God to a wayward humanity
Evaluation and Significance of Hobbes