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Yes, I'm going to be looking at your other edits.
Plenty of WP:RS for this. WP:GA might be a bit of a stretch, but it could happen. Thanks for making the stub.
Potential sources to follow.
Garamond Lethe
t
c 03:31, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
Correct use of an editor's history includes (but is not limited to) fixing unambiguous errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, or correcting related problems on multiple articles.
Dickie, William M. (Sept. 1922).
"A Comparison of the Scientific Method and Achievement of Aristotle and Bacon". The Philosophical Review. 31 (5). DukeUP: 489–490. {{
cite journal}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)
In spite of Bacon's recognition of Idola Fori, he, like Aristotle, is frequently led astray by the common use of words. Aristotle made no attempt to attach a definite, scientific meaning to the word `hot', for example. He did not get beynd the vague meaning attached to that term in popular discourse. Bacon's inquiry into the nature of heat exhibits the same tendency, albeit that inquiry was designed to reach a scientific result. Thus Bacon assumes that anything called hot is of the same fundamental nature as anything else called hot, e.g., all flame has heat, so also all villous substances, as wool, skins of animals, and down of birds. The same supremacy of words accounts for the belief, common to Aristotle and Bacon, that heat and cold are absolute qualities. It accounts, too, for the belief, also common to Aristotle and Bacon, that natures and appetites are absolute qualities. Thus Bacon speaks, for example, of certain bodies being in `sympathy' with certain others, preferring these others as better, etc. Gold, he says again, and other metals in leaf do not `like' the surrounding air. Paper, too, and cloth, and things of that kind, do not `get on well' with the air, which is inserted into and mingled with their pores. So the `gladly' suck in water or other liquid, and drive out the air. Like Aristotle, Bacon believed it to be the `nature' of light bodies to move upwards from the earth's surface, of heavy bodies to move downwards to the earth's surface. And all this notwithstanding Bacon's recognition that "what are called occult and specific properties, or sympathies and antipathies, are in great part corruptions of philosophy"; his assertion that "my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding ... that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things; and his theoretic avoidance of anthropomorphism in natural science. (emphasis in original, internal citations ommitted) [1]
Aristotle, indeed, did, as we have already noticed, appreciate the vague and misleading character of popular distinctions, but this appreciation was no essential part of his philosophy, as was the exposition of idola part of Bacon's. Consequently Bacon recognizes the difficulty of attaining to simple natures defined with scientific accuracy. Meantime they are vague, indistinct, inaccurate notions - idola fori.
Hunter, William (1832). An Anglo-Saxson Grammar, and Derivatives. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman. p. i–ii.
In this part of the work much light has been derived from that ingenious Philologist, Horne Tooke .... His views of abstraction are generally, but not always either clear or just. When he says "strictly speaking there is nothing arbitrary in language," he expresses what is truly philosophical, for he evidently admits that "we are struck with a similarity in certain respects" before "we invent a common appellative to express the objects that agree in exciting the same relative feeling;" but his admission, like expressions on the same subject that are found in several philosophical writings, "arises," as an able Metaphysician observes, "from the inconsistency of error, and not from the writers having arrived at the truth."—For how can it be reconciled with such expressions as these? "The business of the mind, as far as it concerns language, extends no farther than to receive impressions, that is, to have sensations or feelings." "What are called the operations of the mind, are merely the operations of language." "Language is the instrument of thought." If we expel from the mind what Bacon terms Idola Fori, ("Idols of the market-place," that is, "prejudices arising from mere words and terms in our common intercourse with mankind,") we shall find that all abstract truth ultimately rests upon,—1st, "A perception or conception of two or more objects,"—2dly, "A feeling of their similarity in certain respects," and 3dly, ["]The invention of a common appellative, to express the objects that agree in exciting the same relative feeling ." (emphasis in original) [2]
Halliday, M.A.K.; Martin, J.R. (1993). Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Education. London: The Falmer Press. p. 5. ISBN 0-203-20993-1.
The early humanists, founders of modern science in the West, paid more serious attention to language in their endeavours. In part, this was forced upon them because they were no longer using the language that had served their predecessors , Latin, and instead faced the job of developing their various emerging 'national' languages into resources for constructing knowledge. But their concern with language went deeper than that. On the one hand they were reacting against what they saw as (in our jargon of today) a logocentric tendency in medieval thought; the best-known articulation of this attitude is Bacon's `idols of the marketplace' (idola fori), one of the four idola or fale conceptions which he felt distorted scientific thinking. The idola fori result, in Dijksterhuis' words,
from the thoughtless use of language, from the delusion that there must correspond to all names actually existing things, and from the confusion of the literal and the figurative meaning of a word. (Dijksterhuis, 1961, p. 398)
The `delusion' referred to here had already been flagged by William of Occam, whose often quoted stricture on unnecessary entities was in fact a warning against reifying theoretical concepts such as `motion'; the perception that lay behind this suspicion of language was later codified in the nominalist philosophy of John Locke, summed up by David Oldroyd as follows:
The important point, of course, is that the new philosophy claimed that new knowldge was to be obtained by experimentation, not by analysis of language or by establishing the correct definitions of things. If you wanted to know more about the properties of gold than anyone had ever known before you would need a chemical laboratory, not a dictionary! (Oldroyd, 1988, p.91–92)
Pérez-Ramos, Antonio. "Francis Bacon and man's two-faced kingdom". In Parkinson, G.H.R (ed.). The Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism. Routledge History of Philosophy. Vol. 4. p. 133. | publisher=Routledge | location=London | year=1993 | ISBN=0-203-02914-3}}
Mankind, according to Bacon, is fatally prone to err fro a variety of reasons. As a species, it has its own limitations which make error inescapable; such intellectual and sensory constraints are called Idola Tribus or Idols of the Tribe, and there is no hint of an optimistic note as to whether they can be overcome or cured. (Nov. Org. I, 399-41). Moreover, each man, when trying to know anything, invariably brings with him his own set of preferences and dislikes, that is, his own psychological make-up, which will colour whatever he attempts to cognize in its purity. These prejudices are the so-called Idola Specus or Idols of the Cave (Bacon is alluding to Plato's image in Republic 514A-519D), to which all of us, as individuals, are subject (Nov. Org. I, 42). Further yet, man is the hopeless victim of the traps and delusions of language, that is, of his own great tool of knowledge and communication, and hence he will fall prey to the Idola Fori or Idols of the Market place, which unavoidably result from his being a speaking animal (Nov. Org. I, 43). [4]
Bacon, Francis (2000). Jardine, Lisa; Silverthorne, Michael (eds.). The New Organon. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. CambridgeUP. p. xix–xx. ISBN 0-521-56399-2.
A significant portion of Book One of The New Organon is taken up with discussion of what Bacon names the 'Idols', or 'Illusions'—impediments of various kinds which interfere with the proess of clear human reasoning. These so-called Idols are of four kinds: Idols of the Tribe Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Marketplace and Idols of the Theater.
The Idols of the Tribe are errors in perception itself, caused by the limitations of the human sensese which give access to the data of nature. The Idols of the Cave, by contrast, are errors introduced by each individual's personal prejudices and attachment to particular styles or modes of explanation—as in his fellow-courtier (and personal physician to Elizabeth I) William Gilbert's trying to account for all natural phenomena in terms of magnetism.
The Idols of the Marketplace arise directly from shared use of language and from commerce between people. At the most basic level, the ascription of names to things, in ordinary language usage, fails to discriminate properly between distinctive phenomena, or names abstract entities 'vaguely', so as to give rise to false beliefs above them.
Finally, Idols of the Theater are the misleading consequences for human knowledge of the systems of philosophy and rules of demonstration (reliable proof) currently in place. [5]
Mott, William (2004). Globalization: People, Perspectives, and Progress. Greenwood Publishing Group.
From google books search I find Mott 2004. Page 15 is all about idola fori. Page 17 refers to it in passing as Impediments of language and culture, and brackets together idola tribus and idola specus as related to "observation" in the context of how scientists and philosophers balance knowledge and understanding between orthodoxy (idola theatri), observation and insight (idola tribus).-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 13:42, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Fowler, H. W. (1926 (reprinted 2009)).
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford World's Classics (1st (reprint with introduction by David Crystal) ed.). p. 252–253.
ISBN
978-0-19-958589-2. {{
cite book}}
: Check date values in: |year=
(
help)
idola fori, idols of the market (place). This learned phrase, in Latin or English, is not seldom used by the unlearned, who guess at its meaning & guess wrong. It is a legitimate enough phrase in writing meant for the educated only, but hardly in the ordinary newspaper, where it is certain not to be understood by most readers, & where it therefore tends to be given, by slipshod extension, the false sense that those who have never been told what it means may be expected to attach to it; that false sense is vulgar errors or popular fallacies, one of which names should be used instead of it, since it in fact has a much more limited meaning than they, & one not obvious without explanation. See popularized technicalities.
It is the third of Bacon's four divisions of fallacies, more often mentioned than the other three because its meaning seems, though it is not in fact, plainer. There are the idols (i.e. the fallacies) of the tribe, the cave, the market, & the theatre, which are picturesque names for (1) the errors men are exposed to by the limitations of the human understanding (a members of the tribe of man); (2) those a person is liable to owing to his idiosyncrasy (as enclosed in the cave of self); (3) those due to the unstable relation between words & their meanings (which fluctuate as the words are bandied to & from in the conversational exchange or word-market); & (4) those due to false philosophical or logical systems (which hold the stage successively like plays). The tribe is the human mind, the cave is idiosyncrasy, the market is talk, &: the theater is philosophy; who would guess all that unaided? who, on the contrary, would not guess that an idol of the marketplace was just any belief to which the man in the street yields a mistaken deference? The odd thing is that no better instance could be found of an idol of the market than the phrase itself, oscillating between its real meaning & the modern misuse, so often propagating one in the very act of ridiculing the rest; well, 'tis sport to see the enginer [sic] hoist with his own petard. The mistake is common enough, but is not easily exhibited except in passages of some length, so that one must here suffice; the tendency to exalt the man of action above the man of theory may be ill-advised, but it has nothing to do with shifting acceptations of words, & is not an idolum fori:&mdashWith us the active characters, the practical men, the individuals who, whether in public or in private affairs, 'get on with the job', have always held the first place in esteem; the theorists & philosophers a place very secondary by comparison. It is not easy to account for this common estimate. For one thing, as soon as inquiry is made into it, the belief proves to be without foundation—just one of the idols of the marketplace.(Emphasis in original. Note the google books version has multiple OCR errors which have been corrected by referring to the dead tree version.)
Funari, Anthony (2011), Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse, Palgrave Macmillan
Discusses how this subject was taken up by Hobbes.-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 11:51, 7 December 2013 (UTC)
These sources might of course be useful in many ways, but let me remind you of the question at hand. You were, as I understand it, saying that you checked 12 books, which disagreed with defining Idola fori as "a deeply rooted tendency for people to come to faulty understandings, because of confusions about what words mean in particular contexts". (Which is just pretty much what Bacon says, and the sources above take for granted. See the Bacon quotes in the article now.) Do you have any specific citations which would indicate a real mistake in that definition I put in the lead?-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 20:18, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
Nice work on cleaning up the sources. I have a few more to add when I get a free moment today. Will look at the rest of your comments then.
Garamond Lethe
t
c 16:33, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
Dickie
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Hunter
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Halliday
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).PerezRamos
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Jardine
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Yes, I'm going to be looking at your other edits.
Plenty of WP:RS for this. WP:GA might be a bit of a stretch, but it could happen. Thanks for making the stub.
Potential sources to follow.
Garamond Lethe
t
c 03:31, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
Correct use of an editor's history includes (but is not limited to) fixing unambiguous errors or violations of Wikipedia policy, or correcting related problems on multiple articles.
Dickie, William M. (Sept. 1922).
"A Comparison of the Scientific Method and Achievement of Aristotle and Bacon". The Philosophical Review. 31 (5). DukeUP: 489–490. {{
cite journal}}
: Check date values in: |date=
(
help)
In spite of Bacon's recognition of Idola Fori, he, like Aristotle, is frequently led astray by the common use of words. Aristotle made no attempt to attach a definite, scientific meaning to the word `hot', for example. He did not get beynd the vague meaning attached to that term in popular discourse. Bacon's inquiry into the nature of heat exhibits the same tendency, albeit that inquiry was designed to reach a scientific result. Thus Bacon assumes that anything called hot is of the same fundamental nature as anything else called hot, e.g., all flame has heat, so also all villous substances, as wool, skins of animals, and down of birds. The same supremacy of words accounts for the belief, common to Aristotle and Bacon, that heat and cold are absolute qualities. It accounts, too, for the belief, also common to Aristotle and Bacon, that natures and appetites are absolute qualities. Thus Bacon speaks, for example, of certain bodies being in `sympathy' with certain others, preferring these others as better, etc. Gold, he says again, and other metals in leaf do not `like' the surrounding air. Paper, too, and cloth, and things of that kind, do not `get on well' with the air, which is inserted into and mingled with their pores. So the `gladly' suck in water or other liquid, and drive out the air. Like Aristotle, Bacon believed it to be the `nature' of light bodies to move upwards from the earth's surface, of heavy bodies to move downwards to the earth's surface. And all this notwithstanding Bacon's recognition that "what are called occult and specific properties, or sympathies and antipathies, are in great part corruptions of philosophy"; his assertion that "my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding ... that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things; and his theoretic avoidance of anthropomorphism in natural science. (emphasis in original, internal citations ommitted) [1]
Aristotle, indeed, did, as we have already noticed, appreciate the vague and misleading character of popular distinctions, but this appreciation was no essential part of his philosophy, as was the exposition of idola part of Bacon's. Consequently Bacon recognizes the difficulty of attaining to simple natures defined with scientific accuracy. Meantime they are vague, indistinct, inaccurate notions - idola fori.
Hunter, William (1832). An Anglo-Saxson Grammar, and Derivatives. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman. p. i–ii.
In this part of the work much light has been derived from that ingenious Philologist, Horne Tooke .... His views of abstraction are generally, but not always either clear or just. When he says "strictly speaking there is nothing arbitrary in language," he expresses what is truly philosophical, for he evidently admits that "we are struck with a similarity in certain respects" before "we invent a common appellative to express the objects that agree in exciting the same relative feeling;" but his admission, like expressions on the same subject that are found in several philosophical writings, "arises," as an able Metaphysician observes, "from the inconsistency of error, and not from the writers having arrived at the truth."—For how can it be reconciled with such expressions as these? "The business of the mind, as far as it concerns language, extends no farther than to receive impressions, that is, to have sensations or feelings." "What are called the operations of the mind, are merely the operations of language." "Language is the instrument of thought." If we expel from the mind what Bacon terms Idola Fori, ("Idols of the market-place," that is, "prejudices arising from mere words and terms in our common intercourse with mankind,") we shall find that all abstract truth ultimately rests upon,—1st, "A perception or conception of two or more objects,"—2dly, "A feeling of their similarity in certain respects," and 3dly, ["]The invention of a common appellative, to express the objects that agree in exciting the same relative feeling ." (emphasis in original) [2]
Halliday, M.A.K.; Martin, J.R. (1993). Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Education. London: The Falmer Press. p. 5. ISBN 0-203-20993-1.
The early humanists, founders of modern science in the West, paid more serious attention to language in their endeavours. In part, this was forced upon them because they were no longer using the language that had served their predecessors , Latin, and instead faced the job of developing their various emerging 'national' languages into resources for constructing knowledge. But their concern with language went deeper than that. On the one hand they were reacting against what they saw as (in our jargon of today) a logocentric tendency in medieval thought; the best-known articulation of this attitude is Bacon's `idols of the marketplace' (idola fori), one of the four idola or fale conceptions which he felt distorted scientific thinking. The idola fori result, in Dijksterhuis' words,
from the thoughtless use of language, from the delusion that there must correspond to all names actually existing things, and from the confusion of the literal and the figurative meaning of a word. (Dijksterhuis, 1961, p. 398)
The `delusion' referred to here had already been flagged by William of Occam, whose often quoted stricture on unnecessary entities was in fact a warning against reifying theoretical concepts such as `motion'; the perception that lay behind this suspicion of language was later codified in the nominalist philosophy of John Locke, summed up by David Oldroyd as follows:
The important point, of course, is that the new philosophy claimed that new knowldge was to be obtained by experimentation, not by analysis of language or by establishing the correct definitions of things. If you wanted to know more about the properties of gold than anyone had ever known before you would need a chemical laboratory, not a dictionary! (Oldroyd, 1988, p.91–92)
Pérez-Ramos, Antonio. "Francis Bacon and man's two-faced kingdom". In Parkinson, G.H.R (ed.). The Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism. Routledge History of Philosophy. Vol. 4. p. 133. | publisher=Routledge | location=London | year=1993 | ISBN=0-203-02914-3}}
Mankind, according to Bacon, is fatally prone to err fro a variety of reasons. As a species, it has its own limitations which make error inescapable; such intellectual and sensory constraints are called Idola Tribus or Idols of the Tribe, and there is no hint of an optimistic note as to whether they can be overcome or cured. (Nov. Org. I, 399-41). Moreover, each man, when trying to know anything, invariably brings with him his own set of preferences and dislikes, that is, his own psychological make-up, which will colour whatever he attempts to cognize in its purity. These prejudices are the so-called Idola Specus or Idols of the Cave (Bacon is alluding to Plato's image in Republic 514A-519D), to which all of us, as individuals, are subject (Nov. Org. I, 42). Further yet, man is the hopeless victim of the traps and delusions of language, that is, of his own great tool of knowledge and communication, and hence he will fall prey to the Idola Fori or Idols of the Market place, which unavoidably result from his being a speaking animal (Nov. Org. I, 43). [4]
Bacon, Francis (2000). Jardine, Lisa; Silverthorne, Michael (eds.). The New Organon. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. CambridgeUP. p. xix–xx. ISBN 0-521-56399-2.
A significant portion of Book One of The New Organon is taken up with discussion of what Bacon names the 'Idols', or 'Illusions'—impediments of various kinds which interfere with the proess of clear human reasoning. These so-called Idols are of four kinds: Idols of the Tribe Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Marketplace and Idols of the Theater.
The Idols of the Tribe are errors in perception itself, caused by the limitations of the human sensese which give access to the data of nature. The Idols of the Cave, by contrast, are errors introduced by each individual's personal prejudices and attachment to particular styles or modes of explanation—as in his fellow-courtier (and personal physician to Elizabeth I) William Gilbert's trying to account for all natural phenomena in terms of magnetism.
The Idols of the Marketplace arise directly from shared use of language and from commerce between people. At the most basic level, the ascription of names to things, in ordinary language usage, fails to discriminate properly between distinctive phenomena, or names abstract entities 'vaguely', so as to give rise to false beliefs above them.
Finally, Idols of the Theater are the misleading consequences for human knowledge of the systems of philosophy and rules of demonstration (reliable proof) currently in place. [5]
Mott, William (2004). Globalization: People, Perspectives, and Progress. Greenwood Publishing Group.
From google books search I find Mott 2004. Page 15 is all about idola fori. Page 17 refers to it in passing as Impediments of language and culture, and brackets together idola tribus and idola specus as related to "observation" in the context of how scientists and philosophers balance knowledge and understanding between orthodoxy (idola theatri), observation and insight (idola tribus).-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 13:42, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Fowler, H. W. (1926 (reprinted 2009)).
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford World's Classics (1st (reprint with introduction by David Crystal) ed.). p. 252–253.
ISBN
978-0-19-958589-2. {{
cite book}}
: Check date values in: |year=
(
help)
idola fori, idols of the market (place). This learned phrase, in Latin or English, is not seldom used by the unlearned, who guess at its meaning & guess wrong. It is a legitimate enough phrase in writing meant for the educated only, but hardly in the ordinary newspaper, where it is certain not to be understood by most readers, & where it therefore tends to be given, by slipshod extension, the false sense that those who have never been told what it means may be expected to attach to it; that false sense is vulgar errors or popular fallacies, one of which names should be used instead of it, since it in fact has a much more limited meaning than they, & one not obvious without explanation. See popularized technicalities.
It is the third of Bacon's four divisions of fallacies, more often mentioned than the other three because its meaning seems, though it is not in fact, plainer. There are the idols (i.e. the fallacies) of the tribe, the cave, the market, & the theatre, which are picturesque names for (1) the errors men are exposed to by the limitations of the human understanding (a members of the tribe of man); (2) those a person is liable to owing to his idiosyncrasy (as enclosed in the cave of self); (3) those due to the unstable relation between words & their meanings (which fluctuate as the words are bandied to & from in the conversational exchange or word-market); & (4) those due to false philosophical or logical systems (which hold the stage successively like plays). The tribe is the human mind, the cave is idiosyncrasy, the market is talk, &: the theater is philosophy; who would guess all that unaided? who, on the contrary, would not guess that an idol of the marketplace was just any belief to which the man in the street yields a mistaken deference? The odd thing is that no better instance could be found of an idol of the market than the phrase itself, oscillating between its real meaning & the modern misuse, so often propagating one in the very act of ridiculing the rest; well, 'tis sport to see the enginer [sic] hoist with his own petard. The mistake is common enough, but is not easily exhibited except in passages of some length, so that one must here suffice; the tendency to exalt the man of action above the man of theory may be ill-advised, but it has nothing to do with shifting acceptations of words, & is not an idolum fori:&mdashWith us the active characters, the practical men, the individuals who, whether in public or in private affairs, 'get on with the job', have always held the first place in esteem; the theorists & philosophers a place very secondary by comparison. It is not easy to account for this common estimate. For one thing, as soon as inquiry is made into it, the belief proves to be without foundation—just one of the idols of the marketplace.(Emphasis in original. Note the google books version has multiple OCR errors which have been corrected by referring to the dead tree version.)
Funari, Anthony (2011), Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse, Palgrave Macmillan
Discusses how this subject was taken up by Hobbes.-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 11:51, 7 December 2013 (UTC)
These sources might of course be useful in many ways, but let me remind you of the question at hand. You were, as I understand it, saying that you checked 12 books, which disagreed with defining Idola fori as "a deeply rooted tendency for people to come to faulty understandings, because of confusions about what words mean in particular contexts". (Which is just pretty much what Bacon says, and the sources above take for granted. See the Bacon quotes in the article now.) Do you have any specific citations which would indicate a real mistake in that definition I put in the lead?-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 20:18, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
Nice work on cleaning up the sources. I have a few more to add when I get a free moment today. Will look at the rest of your comments then.
Garamond Lethe
t
c 16:33, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
Dickie
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Hunter
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Halliday
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).PerezRamos
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).Jardine
was invoked but never defined (see the
help page).