The Scientific Method, and the Argument About It

People have been chained in a cave since childhood, facing a blank wall, unable to turn their heads. Behind and above them a fire burns. Between the fire and their backs runs a low walkway with a screen along it, like the screen a puppeteer works behind. People walk that path carrying carved figures of humans and animals, held up above the screen.

The prisoners see the shadows those figures throw on the wall in front of them, and they hear the carriers' voices bounce back off the wall. They have never seen anything else. So they take the shadows for the things themselves, and when an echo arrives they assume the shadow is speaking.

The cave has a society. The prisoners give each other honours, praises and prizes for three skills: recognising a shadow fastest, remembering the order the shadows usually come in, and predicting which one comes next. They call that last one divining the future, and the best forecaster holds the most power.

One prisoner is freed, and every stage of it hurts.

1. He is made to stand and turn toward the fire. His neck aches, the light dazzles him, and the carved figures look blurry and less real than the sharp shadows he knows. Told he is now nearer to real things, he does not believe it.
2. He is dragged up a rough, steep slope into daylight, and outside he can see nothing at all at first.
3. His eyes adapt in order: shadows on the ground, then reflections in water, then the objects themselves, then the night sky and the moon, and last of all the sun.
4. Looking at the sun he works out that it governs the seasons and the year and is in some way the cause of everything he ever saw, the fire and the shadows included.

Now he understands the shadow game from outside, and understands it as a game. He pities the men still down there and says he would rather endure anything than go back to competing for their prizes. Plato has him quote Homer here. In the Odyssey, the ghost of Achilles tells Odysseus that he would rather be alive as a hired hand working for a landless man, the lowest position there was, than reign as king over all the dead. Plato borrows the line to say the freed man would accept any humiliation before going back to the prizes.

Plato spells the allegory out himself, so none of this is guesswork.

• The cave is the visible world, the ordinary one you walk around in.
• The firelight is the sun.
• The climb out is the mind rising to what Plato calls the intelligible realm, meaning the things you grasp by thinking and never by looking.
• The sun outside is what Plato calls the Form of the Good. He says it is the last thing to be seen and the hardest, and that it is the cause of everything correct and beautiful.

Notice that the man's eyes worked the whole time, so nothing was added to him. What changed is the direction he was facing.

So Plato concludes that education cannot be putting knowledge into a mind that lacks it, the way you might put sight into blind eyes. The power to learn is already in everybody. The problem is where it points, and since an eye cannot turn on its own, the whole body has to turn with it. Education is the craft of turning the whole soul around. That is why the story is full of pain and force: turning hurts, and nobody does it voluntarily.

Two words carry the rest of the argument, and they are worth having in plain English.

• Becoming covers everything that changes: this horse, this just act, your body, today's weather. Things that come to be, alter and perish.
• Being covers what stays fixed: what a horse is, what justice is. Plato calls these Forms.

His claim is that you cannot strictly know something that has already changed by the time you have hold of it. So beliefs about changing things are opinion, however true and however useful, and only thinking about the fixed things counts as knowledge.

He then splits each half again, which gives four rungs. This is Plato's ranking, and it is the thing the other eight authors in the packet are arguing with.

A geometer proves his results correctly. He also helps himself to definitions and postulates he never examines, and if you ask what makes them true he has nothing to say. He is reasoning well from a foundation he has never looked at. That is why Plato says the mathematical sciences only dream about what is real.

The same goes for a craftsman. A shipwright builds a good ship and cannot tell you what "good" is. Plato's word for this practical, productive know-how is technē, and his complaint about it is precise: it works, and it cannot give an account of itself.

He is not dismissing it. He says the crafts and the mathematical studies are exactly what start the turn, because they pull the soul away from things it can touch. They are the hand on the arm. Dialectic is where the arm is going. That ranking is what every later author in the packet is arguing with.

Plato imagines the man going back down, and describes two different reactions to two different acts. They are easy to run together and they are not the same.

If he comes back and talks, they laugh at him. His eyes are used to daylight, so in the dark he is worse at the shadow game than men who never left, and he loses to them. Plato says the prisoners would conclude that going up ruined his eyesight, and that the journey is not worth attempting. Plato also pictures him forced to argue in the law courts about what he calls the shadows of justice, against people who have never seen justice itself, where he performs badly and looks ridiculous.

If he tries to unchain them, they kill him. Plato's sentence is specifically about anyone who tried to free them and lead them upward, which is a different act from talking. Three things make it lethal. The cave's honours, and the power that comes with them, exist because the shadow game is treated as the real thing. A man unchaining people is dismantling the basis of everyone's standing, and above all the standing of whoever is currently winning. He is simultaneously, by their own measure, incompetent, since he cannot see. And he is taking away the one thing the prisoners have. Plato did not invent the reaction. Athens had executed his teacher Socrates about twenty years before he wrote this.

Here is the context that makes the question make sense. The cave appears in a book whose subject is the design of a just city, and at this moment in the conversation Socrates and Glaucon are inventing one from scratch. Glaucon objects that the philosopher would be happier left in the sunlight, so forcing him back down looks like an injustice done to him.

Socrates answers that it is not unjust, and gives two reasons. Both are answers to why compel him.

1. The city made him, so the city may use him. In an ordinary city a philosopher appears by accident. The constitution did not plan him, pay for him or want him, so he owes it nothing and may keep out of public life with a clear conscience. In the city they are designing he was picked out as a child, educated at public expense and put through the entire ascent deliberately, for this purpose. What grows by itself owes nothing for its upbringing. What was cultivated does. Plato adds that the law was never trying to make any one group outstandingly happy: its job is to hold the city together, and that sometimes means using people.
2. He is the only person who can safely be given power. Anyone who wants to rule wants it for what it gives him, and a city where rivals all want it tears itself apart in the fighting. The safe ruler is the one who would rather be doing something else. The man who has seen daylight is exactly that person, and he is also the only one who can tell a real image from a fake, which is the skill governing actually needs. So the city must have him, and since he does not want the job, it must compel him.

Which means the man who goes back into the cave is the philosopher-king. The return is not an epilogue to the story about enlightenment. It is a description of what governing feels like from the inside. You come back down to people who are better than you at a contest you now think is meaningless. You are laughed at, you lose that contest, and you are in some danger from the people you are trying to help. Plato's answer is that he has to do it anyway, and that a city run by anyone else is worse.

• Bacon turns it upside down. For him, being able to build the ship is the only proof that anybody understood anything. So the craftsman moves from the bottom of the ladder to the top, and the contemplative philosopher becomes the man who produced nothing in two thousand years.
• Comte keeps Plato's appetite for certainty and gives up on his subject matter. Asking what a thing really is, which is Plato's whole project, belongs for Comte to an earlier and outgrown stage of the human mind. What survives is the reliable statement of what follows what.
• The Vienna Circle go further and rule the question out. A sentence about what justice itself is, with no observation that could settle it, is not a hard question on their account. It is a sentence with no content, and Plato is the named example.
• Rousseau leaves the ladder alone entirely and asks a different question: whether any rung of it makes a person better. His answer is that a nation which gets good at the top rungs gets worse at being decent, so the ranking sorts the wrong thing.
• Lynn White asks where a ranking like that comes from. A culture that puts contemplation above making will build differently from one that treats work as worship, and he claims that difference is visible in what medieval Europe built and its neighbours did not.
• Foucault asks what a ranking does. Deciding which kind of knowing counts is also deciding whose knowing counts, and therefore who is fit to govern whom, which for him is what the whole apparatus was ever for.

The other eight authors argue about method. This one looks like a dictionary entry, and it is here for two reasons.

The practical reason. The whole argument in this reading runs on two Greek words, physis and technē, which English translates as "nature" and "technology". Both translations are wrong enough to make Plato and Aristotle unreadable. Schadewaldt recovers what the words actually did.

The reason it is an argument and not a glossary. His claim is that the Greek way of joining those two words made it impossible to think about technology the way we now do, and that their version showed something ours hides: where technique stops. The essay ends by saying the Greeks already knew that technical power puts a person at a fork between good and evil, and that this is still our problem. So the payoff is a claim about us.

Physis is the ancient Greek word that comes into English as "nature". That is the whole connection between the two words, and it is where the trouble starts, because the English word carries a picture the Greek one never had. Say "nature" and most people see scenery: a place you go for a walk, trees and animals sitting there being looked at.

Physis points somewhere else. It comes from the verb phyō, meaning to bring forth, put forth, make grow, and the Greeks used it for a tree putting out leaves and for animals putting out hair, wings and horns. The -sis ending turns a verb into a process word, the way English turns "grow" into "growing". So physis names a growing, an activity, a coming-to-pass. It is a verb wearing a noun's clothes, and it never means a collection of objects.

Aristotle turns it into a definition: physis is whatever has the source of its own motion inside itself. A tree grows on its own. A chair does not, because somebody has to make a chair. So the Greek line between nature and everything else is drawn by asking one question: where does the push come from?

Two things to fix before going on, because both trip people up.

It is wider than our "technology". We hear the word and think of machines and devices. Technē covers medicine, seamanship, music and cookery as readily as carpentry. Anything with a skill and a product.

It is narrower than our "skill". A knack does not qualify. Technē is skill plus a grasp of what you are working with, and the next few paragraphs are about exactly that second half.

What separates it from plain experience

Experience and technē both come out of repetition, so that is not the difference. The text is explicit: technē is a knowledge and ability that has come about by habit, and has passed into flesh and blood. Doing the thing many times is where both of them begin.

What separates them is whether a correct grasp of the thing itself travels with the skill. Here is the definition in the text, which is worth having word for word, because it is the sentence the whole distinction rests on.

In plain words: technē is a skill you picked up by doing something over and over until it became automatic, which you use to make something, and which comes with a correct understanding of what you are working on. The person who only has experience has the first two and is missing the third.

Taking the phrases one at a time:

• "come about by habit, passed into flesh and blood" means you learned it by repetition until your hands do it without being told. Muscle memory.
• "directed to a producing" means it makes something. It has an output in the world.
• "in connection with a clear course of reasoning concerning the thing itself" means you can also follow a line of thought about what the thing you are working on actually is.
• "which the man of mere experience does not have in view" means the person with experience alone cannot do that last part, and would not know where to start.

So experience knows the that. Technē knows the why.

Which gives three states a skilled person can be in. They are states of the person holding the knowledge, and not grades of the knowledge sitting on its own.

So the test is not how much explanation your century can supply. A doctor with a scanner and a doctor in 1600 can each have technē, as long as each holds a correct account of what they are treating, and either can have atechnía if their account is wrong. This is why the three words describe a knower and not a level of scientific progress.

How can a rich and varied skill sit on top of a wrong idea? Easily, and the history of medicine is mostly made of it.

So the Greeks counted atechnía as a fault for two reasons, and both are visible in those cases. The false account is what you reason from the moment a case is unfamiliar, so it fails you exactly when understanding is the only thing that would help. And it cannot be handed on in any form that survives you, because what you would be handing on is wrong.

One level above all three sits epistēmē, theoretical knowledge: knowledge of what never changes, such as the fact that the angles of a triangle add to two right angles. It produces nothing, and Greek thought ranked it highest. Technē leans toward it, which is the whole of its dignity.

First, technē imitates nature. Building a house and growing a tree have the same shape: out of some material, by some agency, a form gets realised. The only difference is where the push comes from. In nature the form unfolds by itself. In making, the finished form exists first in somebody's head, so the work runs plan, then design, then construction, then choice of materials, and only then the building itself.

Second, technē completes what nature cannot finish. Nature left alone goes one way and repeats itself, while what people need varies as much as people do. So technique invents devices that turn nature's own forces to human purposes. The example the essay gives is the lever, which lets a person shift a load far heavier than themselves. In the line Schadewaldt quotes from a tragic poet, by technique we master the things we are subject to by nature.

Those two pull against each other, and the Greeks held both. Technique works the way nature works, and it exists to get nature to do things it would never do on its own.

Because they kept technique tied to theoretical knowledge, two moves were closed to them.

One: technique could never set its own goals

On the Greek picture, technique is answerable to knowledge of how things actually are. So the question should we make this gets settled by facts outside the technique: what the thing is for, and what nature will and will not allow. Technique on its own has no way to answer it.

Can it now? That is exactly Schadewaldt's charge, and his answer is yes. Once technique is cut loose from the requirement to understand, the only test left is whether it works. And "does it work" is a question technique can put to itself, with nobody else in the room. He means independence in that sense: an activity that grades its own homework.

Two: nature could never become a warehouse

Go back to the definition. Physis is whatever starts its own motion, which means nature is something that is doing something. A forest, on that picture, is a process in the middle of running. Technique joins in and finishes what the process could not finish alone.

Here is why that blocks the warehouse idea. To treat a forest as a stock of timber, you first have to stop seeing something that is going somewhere and start seeing a quantity that is sitting there. You have to subtract the motion. The Greek word has the motion built into it, so in Greek that subtraction cannot be performed: physis means the growing, and a thing that is growing is not a pile.

Our word does the subtraction before the argument starts. Say "natural resources" and the motion is already gone, because "resources" names a quantity available for use.

Why any of that matters

How you describe a thing decides what counts as a reasonable way to treat it. If a forest is a process you are joining, then felling it is interrupting something, and you owe an account of why the interruption is worth it. If a forest is a stock of timber, then felling it is using it, and no account is owed, because using a stock is what a stock is for.

Schadewaldt's charge is that nobody ever won that argument. There was no debate in which one side proved that nature is a stock and the other side conceded. The vocabulary changed, and the conclusion came with it, and by the time anyone thought to ask the question the words available for asking it already contained the answer.

Which is why he says the Greek concept matters now. It is a version of the same words in which the question is still open, so having it gives you somewhere to stand outside your own vocabulary. Every argument about climate, land and extraction is conducted in the language of resources, and this chapter is about how that language got there.

Both of those moves are modern, and his point is that somebody had to make them. They are positions that were arrived at, and this is the sentence to carry into class.

One complication worth holding on to, because it cuts against Plato. In Plato's own dialogues, Socrates goes round Athens looking for someone who genuinely knows something, is disappointed by the politicians and the poets, and finds real knowledge among the craftsmen. His one complaint about them is that knowing one thing properly made them think they could judge everything. So the culture that produced Plato's ranking also produced the observation that makers were the only people in the city who knew anything.

The essay closes on two Greek plays, and the closing is the point of the whole chapter. The essay assumes you know both stories, so here they are.

The chorus lists what this terrible ability has done. It made human beings master of land and sea. It let them set up states and cultures. It even let them take up arms against death, meaning medicine. And then the line the whole essay is built toward: because man holds in his hand, through the inventiveness of technique, something clever beyond expectation, he stands where the path forks toward good and evil.

Schadewaldt thinks Sophocles got it exactly right, 2,400 years early. The problem he means is this. The better human tools get, the more good a person can do with them and the more harm a person can do with them, and the tools themselves say nothing about which of the two anybody will choose. A sharper knife cuts bread better and cuts people better. That is still our situation, which is why a play about a burial dispute ends up in a course about scientific method.

Why that is the point of the chapter. Tying technique to understanding, and to a nature that has its own way of going, is what lets you see technique's limits as well as its powers. The essay's last words are that technique becomes a great human power through its correctly conceived use, and the Greek concept is offered as what makes a correct conception available.

Two different failures, worth keeping apart

It is easy to run these together, and they are not the same thing.

• Atechnía is a wrong account. You have a theory of what you are doing and it is false. Bloodletting and the lobotomy are this. Old, and the Greeks had a word for it because it was familiar to them too.
• The modern move is no account, and no account required. The technique is not held to any theory of what it is working on, because the field's own standard of success does not ask for one.

By 1620 the learned world had been arguing about Aristotle for roughly nineteen centuries and had produced, by Bacon's reckoning, almost nothing anyone could use. Meanwhile three inventions had reshaped the world, the compass, gunpowder and printing, and all three had been stumbled on by people whose names nobody recorded.

His diagnosis is that knowledge had been organised as a debating competition, in which the winner is whoever argues most skilfully from what everyone already accepts. A contest like that can never produce anything new, because it only rearranges existing beliefs. He calls his book the Novum Organum, the new instrument, as a direct replacement for Aristotle's works on logic, which were called the Organon.

He is not saying knowledge turns out to be useful. He is saying that knowing the cause of a thing just is knowing what would have to be arranged for it to happen. The understanding and the recipe are the same item.

Turn that round and you get a test: arrange the conditions, and if the effect does not follow, you had not identified the cause. Which is why he says the failures of technology come from ignorance of causes, and why he says nature is commanded only by being obeyed. You get your way with the world by finding out how it already works and then setting up those conditions on purpose.

Bacon's image is that the mind is not a flat mirror. It is an uneven one, so it distorts what it reflects and mixes something of its own into everything. Before any method can work, the distortions have to be identified. He calls them Idols, false images lodged in the understanding, borrowing the Greek eidōlon, a phantom or image, from the same family of words Plato uses for the shadows on the cave wall.

1. Idols of the Tribe, which come with being human, so everyone has them. The mind sees more order and regularity than is there, and it counts the hits while forgetting the misses. Bacon's own example: a man is shown the temple offerings of sailors who prayed in a storm and survived, and asked whether the gods are not powerful. He replies by asking where the offerings of the men who drowned are kept. Above all, this idol makes us treat human senses as the measure of things. Bacon names his target there: Protagoras, a Greek philosopher of Socrates' generation, whose one surviving famous line is that man is the measure of all things. Bacon says the measure is in the world, and human senses are a poor instrument for reading it.
2. Idols of the Cave, the private cave each person carries. Temperament, upbringing, the books you happened to read, the teacher you admire, whether you are drawn to differences or to similarities. He quotes Heraclitus, an early Greek philosopher, to the effect that people look for knowledge in their own small worlds and not in the world everyone shares.
3. Idols of the Market-place, which he thinks are the worst. Words take their meanings from ordinary trade and conversation, so they are fixed to how things look to ordinary people going about their business. A badly made word then forces bad thinking on everyone who uses it. You cannot escape by defining your terms, because definitions are made of more words.
4. Idols of the Theatre, the philosophical systems people inherit. He calls them stage-plays: complete, tidy, internally consistent invented worlds, performed for an audience that mistakes them for the world.

The induction people already practised was: notice a few cases, jump to a general rule. Bacon says that is a machine for producing confident nonsense. His version is deliberately slow.

• Build organised tables of instances. Cases where the thing is present, cases where it is absent in otherwise similar circumstances, and cases where it varies in degree.
• Use the negatives to eliminate. The absences do the work, because they rule candidate causes out. This is the part earlier induction had no use for.
• Climb in small steps. Move from particulars to the lowest general statements, then upward gradually. The old habit was to leap to the highest axioms and deduce back down.
• Design experiments to answer a question. He separates discoveries that merely happened, which he calls chance, from discoveries that were hunted deliberately, which he calls experiment. Converting the first into the second is the whole programme.

And it has to be institutional, because no individual can do this in a lifetime. Bacon wants the universities rebuilt around apparatus, shared written records, and a division of labour between the people who gather instances and the people who reason from them.

The sciences are the masterpiece of genius and reason. The spirit of imitation produced the fine arts and experience perfected them. We are indebted to the mechanical arts for a great many useful inventions that genuinely added to the pleasures and conveniences of life. Rousseau says he agrees with all of it wholeheartedly, and he means it.

Then he changes what is being measured: now let us consider all this knowledge in relation to morals.

1. Knowledge is distributed among actual people. If celestial intellects cultivated the sciences, only good would come of it, and the same holds for great men, who are made to guide others. But the vices of ordinary men poison even the most sublime knowledge and make it harmful to nations. The wicked derive a great deal from it. The good derive very little more.
2. Athens is the proof. If nobody but Socrates had professed philosophy there, the blood of a just man would not be crying out for vengeance against the fatherland of the sciences and arts. The city that produced philosophy killed the one man who had it.
3. And here is the mechanism, which is the real argument. As a taste for these things spreads through a nation, the nation loses its taste for solid virtues, because it costs less to distinguish yourself by talk than by good conduct. Once a man can be excused from being good provided he is pleasant, everybody takes the cheaper route. Learning produces politeness, politeness spreads taste and style, and all of it is at best the supplement of virtue. It will never be virtue.

This chapter is bound into the same PDF and it is set for the following week. The Brightspace module lists Panopticism under week 3, alongside the Kuhn chapter, so the whole of it is narrated in the week 3 guide and the glossary for it lives there too.

He stays in the comparison table and the diagram above, because those are a map of the packet and he is the ninth voice in the quarrel. What he argues, in full, is one link away.