As final exams approach, the teaching assistants are all busy too… This time I was a bit lazy with the assignment and didn’t annotate and reply to each student one by one. In fact, last time I did annotate and reply individually, many people simply didn’t even look at my comments, and the citations were still nonstandard. That really disappointed me… Of course, if you would like to communicate with me, you can take the initiative to contact me.
Given that this assignment was relatively open, the standards were also hard to set, and it was the final assignment, I suggest grading somewhat leniently, with 8 points as the basic norm.
Unfortunately, however, although the assignment prompt seemed relatively open—unlike the previous two, which were more precise—the papers handed in did not display the diversity one would have expected. In general, everyone still wrote the same old formulaic things: Bacon’s view of science, Bacon’s scientific method… rather disappointing.
First of all, the topic is “Bacon science,” not “Bacon,” nor “Bacon’s view of science,” “Bacon’s scientism,” “Bacon’s methodology of science,” and so on. Of course you can discuss the characteristics of Bacon science in connection with Bacon as a person and his doctrines, but do not confuse concepts; to launch directly into an introduction of Bacon’s philosophical thought or Bacon’s view of science without first clarifying what “Bacon science” means is, in fact, to miss the point entirely.
It should be noted that “Bacon science” is not an everyday concept. In fact, it is mainly something Kuhn explicitly mentioned there; other scholars may also use it, but not in Kuhn’s sense, or you may also give it your own definition. But one should make one’s concept clear: if you are using it in Kuhn’s sense, then you must explicitly bring in Kuhn’s definition; if you are giving it your own definition, then even more so you need a clear statement. Quite a few students cited Kuhn’s The Essential Tension, which is good, but even when they cited Kuhn, it was as though everything Kuhn said were common knowledge, and Bacon science was treated as a ready-made concept needing no clarification. That is regrettable. Once we enter university, we should gradually shed the high-school habit of being force-fed and stuffed full of material. Our goal is not to memorize a bunch of fixed, settled formulas, but to learn independent reflection and questioning, to notice that many concepts and many claims may not have definitive conclusions in academic circles, and that different people have different views. What exactly Bacon science is, and even whether there is really such a thing as Bacon science, are all open to discussion. And probing and analyzing these viewpoints is the main task of the paper.
Notice that our topic is “On Bacon Science,” not “An Introduction to Bacon Science” or “A Brief Account of Bacon Science,” and so on. This means that I want you to write an “argumentative essay”; a paper is not an encyclopedia entry. It must have a “problem consciousness.” In fact, the previous two assignments already gave some prompts for propositions—for example, “From the standpoint of Ptolemaic science…” or “On the XX-ness and YY-ness of the Copernican system.” As for this assignment, there was no specific direction prescribed, but that only means it was more open and free, requiring you to determine your own direction, not that this assignment did not need a clear line of argument. So an appropriate topic might be: from Bacon science, look at… in the Scientific Revolution period; or, on the XX-ness and YY-ness of Bacon science. Or you may start from a new path, but you must have a problem consciousness. Of course, the safest question is to discuss the concept of “Bacon science,” to make clear what exactly Bacon science is, who is proposing such a concept, whether the concept is reasonable, and what the actual genealogy of Bacon science in the history of science really is. If you absolutely insist on writing an expository rather than argumentative piece, then it would be better to introduce Kuhn’s theory rather than Bacon’s doctrine. Because if you finish introducing Bacon’s points one, two, and three, and still do not circle back to explain what Bacon science means, then it still is not quite on point.
All papers this time that simply turned the essay into an introduction to Bacon’s philosophical thought or view of science will generally receive 8 points; those that are poorly written will get 7.5 or below. As long as there is a certain degree of reflective analysis, as long as Bacon science is not treated as a self-evident ready-made concept, 8.5 or 9 points are what I am prepared to give; I may even give 9.5, but in fact even the best papers can only be described as passable and proper enough, nothing beyond expectation.
Actually, I myself have some thoughts on Bacon science. The method of academic research, put crudely, is nothing more than two kinds: one is philosophy, the other is history. The former emphasizes the inner derivation of concepts and seeks sameness; the latter emphasizes observation and recording, preserving diversity. The rationalist tradition under the banner of Descartes represents the revolution of the “philosophy” branch in the Western academic tradition, while the tradition under the banner of Bacon represents the revolution of the “history” branch. The history revolution must come before the philosophy revolution and serve as a kind of implicit condition for it, but the history revolution cannot immediately bring about a transformation in upper-level ideas; its method is inherently bottom-up, and so the effects of the history revolution appear relatively slow-burning. Only when the historical tradition and the philosophical tradition finally converge into a new kind of “science” do the effects of the historical tradition become fully apparent. In the end, natural philosophy and natural history both split off from the philosophical or historical tradition, which was transformed into the “humanities.” But because the philosophical tradition has always been “upper-level,” and the philosophy revolution is the “visible line” of the Scientific Revolution, when we trace the origins of modern science we still naturally investigate the tradition of “philosophy,” even though today philosophy and science are far apart. Yet we seldom trace the tradition of “history,” as if history had had nothing to do with the origins of science from the very beginning. Therefore I hope, by reinterpreting “Bacon science,” to reveal an implicit line in the Scientific Revolution, namely, the history revolution.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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