Bacon, Warrant, and Classification

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Bacon, Warrant, and Classification

• Hope A. Olson
• School of Information Studies
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

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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

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Pre-Baconian classifications

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

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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

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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

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Francis Bacons 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

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Francis Bacons Classification

• Classification to show integrated entirety of
  knowledge
• Include knowledge not yet developed
• Bacons approach to classification as
• Reflection of knowledge
• Guide to expansion of knowledge

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17thC scholarship, in Bacons 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)

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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)

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

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Post-Baconian classifications

• Often use Bacons classes and sequence, but not
  epistemological warrant
• Encyclopedists
• Hegel
• Melvil Dewey

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• French encyclopedists, Diderot and dAlembert,
  used the same main classes
• Pedagogical warrant

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G.W.F. Hegel

• Hegels Being, Essence, Idea parallel to
  Bacons History, Poesy, Philosophy
• Ontological warrant

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Dewey Decimal Classification
Amherst College chapel to literary warrant
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 mens judgements by
  confutations. (AL 225)

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Bacons 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

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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

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Hope A. Olsonholson_at_uwm.edu

• School of Information Studies
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee