Gil Martinez, age 14, of Paterson, N.J., for his question:
WHO WAS FRANCIS BACON?
Francis Bacon was an English philosopher and statesman. He was one of the earliest and most influential supporters of empirical or experimental and scientific methods in solving problems.
Bacon was born in London in 1561, the son of an important government official. He went to Trinity College, a part of Cambridge University, from 1573 to 1575. In 1576, he joined the staff of England's ambassador to France.
Bacon was elected to Parliament in 1584 and was knighted in 1603. He held several high government positions until 1621, when he was convicted of taking bribes and was imprisoned briefly.
Bacon believed that all previous claims to knowledge, particularly those of medieval science, were false. He believed that men's minds made hasty generalizations, which prevented the attainment of knowledge.
Most of these generalizations, Bacon explained, were based on insufficient examination of a given phenomenon. Yet he believed that the mind could discover the truth. Through this discovery, man could gain power over nature.
Bacon's major goal for mankind was the achievement of this power. However, the mind first had to be cleansed of four prejudices, which the philosopher called idols.
The first prejudice was man's tendency to interpret his perception or awareness of things as true, rather than distorted. Uncritical human perception could not be trusted, he said.
The second prejudice was the tendency of people to judge matters on the basis of their own education, experience and taste. These factors were untrustworthy as a basis for claims.
The third prejudice resulted from men's relations with one another. Men communicated through words, and words were not precise and led to confusion.
The last prejudice was the influence of previous philosophies and laws of reasoning.
Bacon believed that the mind could attain truth if it strictly followed the inductive method of investigating the cause of a phenomenon. The inductive method involved four steps.
First, a person listed all the known cases in which a given phenomenon occurred.
Second, he listed all the cases in which the phenomenon did not occur.
Third, he listed those instances in which the phenomenon occurred in differing degrees.
Finally, the investigator examined the three lists. He then discovered an element present whenever the phenomenon was present, absent whenever the phenomenon was absent and present in degrees that corresponded to the degrees of the phenomenon's presence. This element could be considered the cause of the phenomenon.
Although Bacon supported experimental methods, he believed man needed preliminary hypotheses or assumptions to aid his investigation. But Bacon never examined the nature of such hypotheses.