A Proposal for the Sciences, Rediscover Bacon's Idols of the Mind

Why is science so stubbornly politicized?  Perhaps we have just been teaching it wrong.

Francis Bacon benefited from his Queen's loyalty to the split with the Catholic church. Being entirely separate had its advantages, and Bacon's firm adherence to Aristotle while despising the state of received Aristotelian philosophy materialized in his bold new vision for the scientific approach.

I am happy to discuss in comments the details of this matter, which I am still working through, but let's make a long story short. Science before Bacon had been captured by the idea of the deductive method. This means that first principles were hypothesized which, when logically applied, would sort out almost any contradiction between competing claims. What if these didn't work because of some new discovery? Simply, revise the first principles. This process would give us insight into the true nature of the world.

Bacon offered an alternative. His method looked towards the inductive method. This takes a radical approach to science that we are all taught in our first laboratory class, the scientific method. Simply put, the scientific method asks us which phenomenon we are interested in and then accumulates related observations. We sort these observations by their perceived priority in association with the main phenomenon of interest.

In this approach, Bacon discovered what he called the Idols of the Mind. He gave them names:

• idola tribus: The idol of the "tribe" deals with coherence of ideas into neat packages. I take this to be related to much of the moral foundations literature Jonathan Haidt is working with. 
• idola spectus: The idol of the "cave" deals with cognitive bias. For example, our minds interpret our enemies best argument as evidence that they have bad intentions. Liberals who watch Fox News confirm their prior that conservatives are crazy. 
• idola fori: The idol of the "marketplace"  deals with language. Often language assumes a meaning quite different the way specialist use it, this helps distort careful logic when applied to the public debate.
• idola theatri: The idol of the "theatre" is the closes to sophistry. The tendency to over-sell academic expertise. 
• idola schola: The idol of the "school" is the pedantic reasoning of textbooks. It is a oversimplification useful only for the teaching of material to neophytes. 

The idols were categories of errors. Science according to Bacon was understanding error, not finding truth.  The most important lesson that Bacon teaches us is that all answers are errors and that these are more or less affected by these idols. To begin the process of cleansing the mind from these idols, there are many approaches. None are going to work. We can only progress by taking the task seriously. 

I find it discouraging sometimes that so many students think that they can posses "the answer" and have simply not been taught the idols of the mind, specifically idola schola. I can't read a periodical without thinking of the idola fori. I have so much contempt for my peers who dismiss the idola theatri and attempt to establish their reputation by sophism. 

The only hope science has is to proceed with a more ready understanding of Bacon's idols. It strikes me that much of what we see as progress in the last 300 years depends on the implicit expectation of this task. If anything explains why modern science is so politicized, it is the fact that we have lost our understanding of Bacon's method. I aim to do better.