At the start of the Sequences, you are told that rationality is a martial art, used to amplify the power of the unaided mind in the same way that a martial art doesn’t necessarily make you stronger but just lets you use your body properly.
Bacon, on the other hand, throws the prospect of using the unaided mind right out; Baconian rationality is a machine, like a pulley or a lever, where you apply your mind however feebly to one end and by its construction the other end moves a great distance or applies a great force (either would do for the metaphor).
If I have my history right, Bacon’s machine is Science. Its function is to accumulate a huge mountain of evidence, so big that even a human could be persuaded by it, and instruction in the use of science is instruction in being persuaded by that mountain of evidence. Philosophers of old simply ignored the mountain of evidence (failed to use the machine) and maybe relied on syllogisms and definitions and hence failed to move the stone column.
And later, with the aid of Bacon’s machine, it turns out that one discovers that you don’t really need this huge mountain of evidence or the systematic stuff and that an ideal reasoner could simply perform a Bayesian update on each bit that comes in and get to the truth way faster, while avoiding all the slowness or all the mistakes that come if you insist on setting up the machine every single time. At your own risk, of course—get your stance slightly wrong lifting a stone column, and you throw your back out.
I see what you’re getting at, viz the inconsistency around ‘aided’. However, as it seems that an ‘unaided’ mind will behave anything like ideally I don’t think I’d agree that the inconsistency exists in fact. Isn’t the ‘aid’ here a software package built up by a culture in light of the systematising ideas, and which gets sold on the basis of the mountain of evidence it explains?
At the start of the Sequences, you are told that rationality is a martial art, used to amplify the power of the unaided mind in the same way that a martial art doesn’t necessarily make you stronger but just lets you use your body properly.
Bacon, on the other hand, throws the prospect of using the unaided mind right out; Baconian rationality is a machine, like a pulley or a lever, where you apply your mind however feebly to one end and by its construction the other end moves a great distance or applies a great force (either would do for the metaphor).
If I have my history right, Bacon’s machine is Science. Its function is to accumulate a huge mountain of evidence, so big that even a human could be persuaded by it, and instruction in the use of science is instruction in being persuaded by that mountain of evidence. Philosophers of old simply ignored the mountain of evidence (failed to use the machine) and maybe relied on syllogisms and definitions and hence failed to move the stone column.
And later, with the aid of Bacon’s machine, it turns out that one discovers that you don’t really need this huge mountain of evidence or the systematic stuff and that an ideal reasoner could simply perform a Bayesian update on each bit that comes in and get to the truth way faster, while avoiding all the slowness or all the mistakes that come if you insist on setting up the machine every single time. At your own risk, of course—get your stance slightly wrong lifting a stone column, and you throw your back out.
I see what you’re getting at, viz the inconsistency around ‘aided’. However, as it seems that an ‘unaided’ mind will behave anything like ideally I don’t think I’d agree that the inconsistency exists in fact. Isn’t the ‘aid’ here a software package built up by a culture in light of the systematising ideas, and which gets sold on the basis of the mountain of evidence it explains?