Bacon and Hypotheses

Bacon insists that in interpreting nature “we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good, and this is the foundation of all. For we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do” (10). This seems to me to exclude the possibility of including a hypothesis (as a supposition based on limited evidence as a starting point for investigation) in such a method. He goes on to say that the understanding is unfit to deal with the natural and experimental history, even when it is ordered into Tables and Arrangements of Instances. Hence, he believes that only by his method of Induction should axioms be formed from the orderly arrangement of the particulars, and that such an arrangement should be made “without premature speculation” (11). (I know this goes beyond the assigned reading, but it’s one aphorism worth continuing to) In aphorism 15, Bacon states that when viewing the instances, induction must itself be at work in an attempt to find a nature within the instances. His reason for this is that “if the mind attempt this affirmatively from the first, as when left to itself it is always wont to do, the result will be fancies and guesses and notions ill defined, and axioms that must be mended every day…” This description of guesses and “axioms” sounds more like what we conceive of as a hypothesis. We are even told in our general science classes that a hypothesis is an educated guess. Furthermore, we know that scientists are commonly changing their hypotheses as each of them fail. So if Bacon doesn’t allow for a hypothesis as we conceive of it today, what does he suggest? It seems that he propounds a method that discovers the correct hypothesis by exclusion. We think of hypotheses as a starting point of investigation, a supposition that something is the case. Bacon seeks the correct hypothesis to be shown to him, not by guessing or supposing and testing a nature, but by discovering it by a sufficient number of negatives: “Man can only proceed at first by negatives and at last to end in affirmatives, after exclusion has been exhausted” (15).