# Induction and Clashes from Scholasticism

## January 8th, 2020

- The pre-class scribblings:

        The sitters, ruminators,
        Readers more than thinkers,
        Sit ye in this classroom?
        Sit I 'longside ye?

        Why come we and wander
        More than wonder? Wherefore
        Come us to hear ideas
        We shall not make our own

        Nor argue against, only
        Make a grade and forget
        Use and then discard as
        Tissue-tufts or worse

- 3 handouts we've received already - impressive!
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- Okay, we had 2 readings today, from Francis Bacon's "Novum Organum" and Galileo's "Assayer"
    - "The readings may seem strange and difficult - I get that, and I feel that way sometimes! That's okay!"

- To understand why Bacon and Galileo are groundbreaking, we need to understand 2 things first: ARISTOTELIANISM and SCHOLASTICISM
    - "Obviously we're going to skip over many details here, but I hope this'll give you a feel for things"
    - People in the Middle Ages still tried to do "philosophy," understanding the world in a systematic way - much like our modern science!
    - Some of their beliefs, though, might seem bizarre to us
        - "Not everyone held these beliefs, but they were all seriously considered at the time"
        - First, we have the "4 causes" from Aristotle, by which he meant explanations for why something is the way it is:
            - MATERIAL causes are the physical makeup of things
            - EFFICIENT causes are the person/things that made something, i.e. how it came about (a craftsman, a machine, something hitting it, etc.)
            - FORMAL causes are the function of something (e.g. a pen is "for" writing, which is why it has a cap, etc.) and related features
            - FINAL (or "TELEOLOGICAL") causes are the "goal" for which something was created, or its purpose; we might say the goal of a pen is to write, or be sold, etc.; this is linked to (but distinct from) the formal cause
                - "You might say that you can do anything with an object - for instance, I could use a pen as a throwing weapon, or a chopstick - but Aristotle would say it has a certain purpose or end that it SHOULD be for"
                - We moderns wouldn't say a cat has a "goal," or a rock has a "goal," but Aristotelians used to think along these lines
        - There are also UNIVERSALS, which are like the essence of a thing; a cow might have some special "cowness" shared by all cows that is *essential* to being a cow
            - PARTICULARS are a lesser form of this, and are features that distinguish individual cows/things from one another
            - "This idea of coming up with a general essence and THEN working down to particulars is the exact opposite of induction, which we use for modern science"

- "These ideas seem strange, right? Now, Aristotle was a *much* better thinker than this caricature I'm giving of his thought, but he was limited by his own lack of science, and was, well, human"
    - Scholastics believed that in order to understand the world, you FIRST had to understand the universals of the world, and then understand individual things in terms of the 4 causes

- Bacon, though, tried to challenge this way of thinking, saying we needed a "better way" of systematically studying nature
    - Bacon argues that his contemporaries "anticipated" nature, coming up with ideas and *then* trying to find evidence for them, often writing away exceptions
        - "Bacon argued that this leads, essentially, to confirmation bias, which he later calls the 'idol of the theatre'"
    - *Instead,* Bacon says our science should be based on INDUCTION: looking at the facts/observations and *then* forming our general rules/observations based on them
        - "Note that induction just gives us probable rules, NOT certainty"

- There was another scientist doing something similar; while Bacon was coming up with his new method of science, Galileo was redefining how the mind fits into the world
    - In our reading, Galileo was arguing for "corpuscularianism," an early form of atomic theory that argued everything was made out of small particles
        - Aristotelians understood change as something acquiring new and different properties over time; Galileo instead saw change as just bits of matter changing
    - In the reading, Galileo is arguing heat is caused by motion - in other words, that it isn't an inherent property of an object. Instead, he argues heat is merely our perception of the motion of corpuscles!
        - Galileo illustrates this by saying that feathers aren't inherently ticklish (there isn't a "ticklish" particle), but the sensation of touching them causes tickling!

- In more modern, philosophical terms, we'd say this is a distinction between "primary" and "secondary" qualities
    - PRIMARY QUALITIES are things that are actually part of an object, like size, shape, and matter
    - SECONDARY QUALITIES are things that are just *our perception* of the object, like color, taste, sound (for Galileo), etc.
        - "Notice that Galileo used a thought experiment to try and prove this difference, which Bacon would *not* have approved of; oftentimes, even thinkers with similar positions will have minor disagreements"
    - Now, Galileo gives us a problem - how do we get from primary to secondary qualities? How does consciousness come from matter, and how does it add on these rich secondary qualities on top of reality?

- Okay, now turn to your handouts on "Rationalism vs Empiricism"
    - RATIONALISTS tend to say that some truths can be known by intuition alone, like mathematics
    - EMPIRICISTS believe the *only* truths we can know are from experience, and that everything else is subjective
        - "I personally *don't* entirely agree with empiricism, although there are strong arguments for it"

- Okay; read Descartes for Monday (Meditations 1/2), and we'll talk more about both our handouts - see you then!