Sentidos, experimentos e instrumentos científicos en Francis Bacon

MANZO, SILVIA

Manuscrito, Revista Internacional de Filosofía

UNICAMP, Centro de Logica, Epistemologia e Historia da Ciencia

Lugar: Campinas; Año: 2001 vol. 24 p. 49 - 85

0100-6045

G. Rees showed how important role quantitative reasoning plays in Bacon’s program of the instauration of science, providing a new view of his method. This piece tries to go on Rees’ re-evaluation of central topics in Bacon’s method, namely the meaning of experimentation and scientific instruments. By so doing the relation between reason and senses will be exposed. In examining the concept of senses as sources for knowledge, their relation to the doctrine of idols, the function of experiment and scientific instruments as repair of senses’ deficiency, the incorporation of quantitative insights in the experimental framework, and the concept of nature’s subtlety and the methodological meaning of anatomy, it is concluded that in Bacon’s method senses are subordinated to reason, in so far as experiments and scientific instruments are considered to be unable by themselves to restore the failures of senses. They need the guide and authority of reason in order to achieve the truth and avoid the error.