Science and management: Using Bacon’s four idols as a theory of managing knowledge workers
One in a series of articles I wrote for an internal Kimberly Clark newsletter on management and science
One of the most important people in the history of science was a lawyer who offered the first theory of the scientific method. Sir Francis Bacon, who later rose to be Lord Chancellor of England in the reign of James I, detailed this in his book, Novum Organum.
Bacon also laid out what he saw as the intellectual fallacies that plagued rational thought. He called them idols; for Bacon, an idol was an image, a fixation of the mind that received veneration but was empty and without substance and there were four:
Idols of the Tribe, which were errors common to human nature, "the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it”,
Idols of the Cave, which were errors specific to individuals, "everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires.... So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance."
Idols of the Marketplace, which Bacon saw as errors arising from the dealings and associations of words and professions: "it is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding”
Idols of the Theater, which were errors arising from the various dogmas of philosophy, professions, and education, "all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion”.
The Baconian scientist was a neutral observer of nature. He observed with a clear, unbiased mind, free from preconceptions that might create errors or misjudgments (his Idols). Given a sufficient amount of such unsullied facts, nature’s patterns will be perceptible and lead the scientist to the truth about nature. Through science, Bacon hoped to avoid the Idols of the Tribe, the inappropriate extension of norms or tenets that apply to the natural constitution of humans to the rank of universal truths. He was aware that being human put its own spin on how we experience things. A good example of this Idol is anthropomorphism, where human features are ascribed to things or animals. Penguins, for example, do indeed pair bond for mating but are not monogamous as (most) humans would recognize the term. We ascribe virtues to the penguin parents that we see in ourselves, or would like to. A subtler example is human color vision: You may say see a flower as azure and I may see it as turquoise but a spectrometer will read 450nm.
No serious philosopher of science holds Bacon’s view of science today. Science, as a method, as a language, as a way of knowing, is dependent upon our preconceived ideas about how the world is and how it works. As the philosopher Herbert Marcuse succinctly put it, “The concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.” It is impossible to observe nature without having decided what is worth observing, what is meaningful, and what can be safely ignored.
At first—and even second—blush, falsification may seem to be the linchpin of science but upon deeper reflection, it is also unlikely to prove a theory false. As Goodstein notes,
“Almost without exception, in order to extract a falsifiable prediction from a theory, it is necessary to make additional assumptions beyond the theory itself. Then, when the prediction turns out to be false, it may well be one of the other assumptions, rather than the theory itself, that is false.”
This is known as the Duhem-Quine Thesis, after the philosophers who raised this caveat. Falsification also is at odds with human nature—why spend all the time and effort that science requires only to show that a theory is wrong?
Confirmed predictions, through experimentation, incrementally support a theory. However, science does undergo amazing shifts of perspective that provide novel and enhanced appreciations for how the world works. Science is not always neat or clean but it does provide the best way to correct for the Idols of the Tribe, those errors in cognition that specifically plague our species. The scientific method, however, does not map neatly into the world of management.
Take metrics. Managers often feel that, like scientists, if you cannot measure it, you do not know what you are doing. As far as that goes, it is correct. But when managers focus measurement systems on non-strategic aims at the expense of the strategic, problems arise (Idols of the Marketplace, perhaps). Benchmarking, a popular method for getting managers to track simple transactions that are comparable across units or industries, can encourage managers to reduce the strategic activities of their workers to the lowest common denominator or worse, to ignore them (Idols of the Theatre). If no strategic linkage to activities exists, it does not matter what is measured. Managing the success of your workers (reducing Idols of the Cave and the Tribe) is as important as measuring it.
Bibliography
Bacon, F. (1854; 1996) Novum Organum, Parry & MacMillan, Philadelphia.
Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man, Beacon Press Books, Boston, MA.
Brenner, A.A. (1990) Holism a century ago: the elaboration of Duhem's thesis, in Pierre Duhem: historian and philosopher of science II, Synthese 83 (2), 325-335.
Goodstein, D. How Science Works, in Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, 2nd Edition, Federal Judicial Center, Washington, D.C.
Kuhn, T. (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Shermer, M.(2005) Science Friction, Times Books, New York.