The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal

by James Franklin

At first sight, this is rather surprising, in view of Bacon’s championing of experience and his professional knowledge of law. But it appears that his conception of induction was formed in an area of law other than the law of evidence. His rivalry with Coke concerned matters of principle as well as personality and included a fundamentally different view of the relation of legal principles to cases: while Coke kept very closely to precedents, Bacon favored the more axiomatic, rule-based approach of Continental law.89 To decide what law is applicable, one collects as many relevant cases as possible, both positive and negative, and infers the rules that will cover the positive cases, while not being contradicted by the negative ones. The cases do not “support” the rules probabilistically but instead impose deductive constraints on what the correct rule could be.90 In the scientific context, this raises the problem of the reliability of the reports of the positive and negative cases themselves, since Bacon proposes to have investigators using many reports, not only those of their own experiments.