Understanding is distorted by four standing sources of error: the idols of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace, and the theatre.
Bacon published them in 1620: the tribe is human nature's own distortions, the cave is individual temperament, the marketplace is language, the theatre is inherited doctrine. Marketplace and theatre have no clean modern equivalent, which is why the list still repays reading.
In practice
- A department's headcount model is built on assumptions everyone in the department shares and nobody has stated — the idols of the tribe, on a spreadsheet.
- A committee adopts the vocabulary of a consultancy and finds it can no longer describe the problem it hired the consultancy to solve.
- Standing
- The earliest systematic catalogue of cognitive bias, three and a half centuries before the experimental literature.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- How knowledge grows, and how inquiry fools itself