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6) Approach to Reality
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Conference hall to count the teeth instead of pouring in the ancient classical texts, the elderly scholars looked at him with surprise and derision, because “Aristotle never did that”.
It was against this type of stagnation of knowledge and academic slavery that Francis Bacon protested. He said that if we have to pursue truth, we have per force to be free from the follies arising out of the fallacies in thought and due to the purely deductive approach towards the seeking of truth. Truth needs to be sought in the world outside and not merely in the deduction of conclusions from the premises in the Aristotalian syllogisms. Francis Bacon started the movement of induction in the scientific investigation as a methodology of investigation.
Francis Bacon wanted to remove the cobwebs of thought in order to get the correct picture of reality. Bacon put more life into logic making induction an epic adventure and a conquest. Philosophy needed a new method. In order to seek the truth in the real sense of the term, Bacon urged us to free ourselves from the traditional stagnations and the fallacies of thought. “Expurgation of thought is the step.” We must become as little children, innocent of ‘isms' and abstractions, washed clear of prejudices and preconceptions. We must destroy the Idols of the mind. Idol is a picture taken for a reality, a thought mistaken for a thing. Bacon mentions 4 Idols of the mind we should scrupulously avoid in seeking truth.
The 4 Idols of the mind are: (i) Idols of the tribe, (ii) Idols of the Cave, (ii) Idols of the market place and (iv) Idols of the Theatre. (i) The idols of the tribe constitute the fallacies natural to
humanity in general. “For man's sense is falsely asserted to be standard of things- Our thoughts are pictures rather of ourselves than of their objects. For instance human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order in the Universe than it really finds. Hence, the fiction that the celestial bodies move in perfect
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