Bacon, Warrant, and Classification

1. Bacon, Warrant, and Classification Hope A. Olson School of Information Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

2. Warrant • the “justifying reason or ground for an action, belief, or feeling” – OED • justification for choice and order of classes or concepts in a classification

3. Pre-Baconian classifications • Based on existing knowledge • Reflect scientific inquiry or pedagogical goals • Kusukawa, Sachiko. (1996). Bacon’s classification of knowledge. In The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, Markku Peltonen, ed., pp. 47-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

4. Aristotle • Sciences independent of each other (Posterior Analytics) • Based on their own premisses • Classification reflects essential attributes • Divided animals by their means of reproduction (Generation of Animals) • Scientific warrant • Result of scientific inquiry

5. Liberal arts • Late classical and medieval classifications are pedagogical • Educational warrant • Hugh of St. Victor • Educational warrant & literary warrant • What to read and in what order to gain wisdom to come closer to God

6. Francis Bacon’s Classification • The Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human (The Advancement of Learning 1605) • De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (De augmentis 1623) – expanded Latin version

7. Francis Bacon’s Classification • Classification to show integrated entirety of knowledge • Include knowledge not yet developed • Bacon’s approach to classification as: • Reflection of knowledge • Guide to expansion of knowledge

8. 17thC scholarship, in Bacon’s view, contributed to: • “magnificence and memory” rather than to “progression and proficience” • “augment the mass of learning in the multitude of learned men” rather than “rectify or raise the sciences themselves” (AL 66)

9. Human intellectual process “The sense, which is the door of the intellect, is affected by individuals only. The images of those individuals – that is, the impressions which they make on the sense – fix themselves in the memory, and pass into it in the first instance entire as it were, just as they come. These the human mind proceeds to review and ruminate; and thereupon either simply rehearses them, or makes fanciful imitations of them, or analyses and classifies them. Wherefore from these fountains, Memory, Imagination, and Reason, flow these three emanations, History, Poesy, and Philosophy; and there can be no others.” (De augmentis book II, chapter 1)

10. Human intellectual process Sense-data Impressions Memory Imagination: Fanciful imitation Reason: Analyze, Classify Review, Ruminate History Poesy Philosophy

11. Epistemological warrant • Classificatory structure comes from the human intellectual process • Includes knowledge yet to come •  the structure leads the development of knowledge rather than following it

12. Post-Baconian classifications • Often use Bacon’s classes and sequence, but not epistemological warrant • Encyclopedists • Hegel • Melvil Dewey

13. French encyclopedists, Diderot and d’Alembert, used the same main classes • Pedagogical warrant

14. G.W.F. Hegel • Hegel’s Being, Essence, & Idea parallel to Bacon’s History, Poesy, & Philosophy • Ontological warrant

15. Dewey Decimal Classification Amherst College chapel to literary warrant

16. Bibliographic classifications • LCC relies on literary warrant • DDC now updated using literary warrant • Bliss, Ranganathan, CRG advocate scientific or philosophical warrant • Beghtol, Clare. (1986). Semantic validity: Concepts of warrant in bibliographic systems. Library Resources & Technical Services 30(April/June) 109-125

17. Classification as active agent • Relationship between bibliographic classification and classification of knowledge • If separate, literary warrant is sufficient • If what is recorded and classified relates to knowledge, literary warrant is not sufficient

18. Gaps in knowledge • Literary warrant cannot identify gaps • Based on record of existing knowledge • Educational warrant cannot identify gaps • Based on teaching existing knowledge • Ontological warrant cannot identify gaps • Based on what has been discovered to exist • Scientific warrant reveals some gaps • Draws structure from what exists revealing some gaps

19. Epistemological warrants reveals gaps • Postmodern doubts of universal frameworks • Bacon leaves openings proposing his: “small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover”

20. Attractive modesty & flexibility “For I could not be true and constant to the argument I handle, if I were not willing to go beyond others, but yet not more willing than to have others go beyond me again: which may the better appear by this, that I have propounded my opinions naked and unarmed, not seeking to preoccupate the liberty of men’s judgements by confutations.” (AL 225)

21. Bacon’s argument • Bacon advocates an epistemological warrant for classification • He looks to classification to integrate knowledge and reveal gaps • He acknowledges that his “small globe of the intellectual world” is not the ultimate universal framework

22. Bacon from the 21st century • A classification can: • Integrate knowledge • Reveal gaps; point to a research agenda • Other classifications are potentially valid • Alternative classifications based on epistemological stances can also: • Integrate knowledge • Reveal gaps; point to a research agenda

23. Hope A. Olsonholson@uwm.edu School of Information Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee