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What is “Impartial Censure”? A Note on Samuel Parker’s Use of Scepticism

Author’s Note: This long blog was written as a supplement to two other papers: 1) The article “The Proleptic Principles of Samuel Parker,” Early Science and Medecine 30 (2025), 237-271, which studies in detail the more assertive part of Parker’s method; 2) The review essay  “Who’s Afraid of the Early Modern Sceptic? A polemical note on Dmitri Levitin’s The Kingdom of Darkness (Cambridge, 2022),” forthcoming in Intellectual History Review, which discusses in more detail the early modern understanding of scepticism as a mental habit.  

 

In his 1666 Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie, Samuel Parker—at the time a recently elected fellow of the Royal Society[1]—declared experimental philosophy the new discipline from which “solid knowledge” and a novel conception of the foundational principles of natural philosophy was emerging: “Experimental knowledge is of all others the safest and most unquestionable.”[2] And this, he asserted, is why “we may rationally expect a greater Improvement of Natural Philosophie from the Royal Society,” because by having “wholly addicted themselves to exact Experiments and Observations, they […] laye firm and solid foundations to erect Hypotheses upon.”[3]

 

The Free and Impartial Censure was principally designed to set the empiricist experimentalism of the Royal Society apart from Cambridge Platonism, to reject the “congenite anticipations” of the latter and instead learn valorise the “common entertainments of sense.”[4] At the same time, however, Parker also presented the work as a bulwark against scepticism. For when “knowledge proceeds in an Empirical way ‘tis solid and palpable, and made so undoubtedly certain from the plain and most undoubted Testimony of Sense and Experience, as undeniably to convince Scepticism of a pitiful and ridiculous Obstinacy.”[5] When reading Parker, it thus comes as a surprise when, just a couple of pages later, he now declares having “lately grown such a despairing Sceptick in all Physiological Theories, that I cannot concern myself in the Truth or Falshood of any Hypotheses.”[6] How could Parker both praise experimental philosophy as the foundation of solid hypothesising and the antidote to scepticism and then, as a defender of experimental philosophy, also declare himself a sceptic who denies all hypotheses?

 

According to Robert Kargon, the “sceptical” passage in the Free and Impartial Censure shows that Parker embraces a “Baconianism of a radical sort,” entirely devoid of hypotheses and wholly dedicated to the writing of natural history.[7] Kargon’s analysis, however, gives Parker’s adherence to scepticism a general reach that is unwarranted by the context of the passage. Parker appeals to scepticism specifically to distance himself from all “Mechanical Hypotheses” that are “too slight and brittle to have any stress laid upon them” because they are “supported only by the thin filme of a brittle Conjecture” and “not anneal’d by experience and observation.”[8] Cartesians are clearly in Parker’s crosshairs. Moreover, Parker employs the argument, not to dismiss the value of hypotheses altogether, but only to deny them absolute certainty:

 

though the Experiments be exact and certain, yet their Application to any Hypotheses is doubtful and uncertain; so that though the Hypothesis may have a firm Basis to bottome upon, yet it can be fastned and cemented to it no other way, but by conjecture and uncertaine (though probable) applications.[9]

 

Parker’s views are here exactly what one would expect them to be. Reservations of this kind is a common feature of practically all versions of the new empirically and experimentally oriented philosophies with their constant caution about hypothesis-making.[10] Moreover, to discuss such reservations explicitly in terms of “scepticism” is by no means unprecedented. Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist (1661) and Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), including the expanded edition entitled Scepsis Scientifica (1665) published in response to Thomas White, are the best known examples.[11] But what did figures like Boyle, Glanvill, and Parker mean exactly when they claimed scepticism for themselves?

 

Let us first consider the case of Robert Boyle. The Sceptical Chymist is set as a dialogue where the author speaks through a character named after the ancient sceptic Carneades. In the preface of the work, Boyle describes the role of his sceptic in the following terms:

 

it is not necessary that all the things a Sceptick Proposes, should be consonant; since it being his work to Suggest doubts against the Opinion he questions, it is allowable for him to propose two or more severall Hypotheses about the same thing: And to say that it may be accounted for this way, or that way, or the other Way, though these wayes be perhaps inconsistent among Themselves. Because it is enough for him, if either of the proposed Hypotheses be but as probable as that he calls a question. And if he proposes many that are Each of them probable, he does the more satisfie his doubts, by making it appear the more difficult to be sure, that that which they alwayes differ from is the true. And our Carneades by holding the Negative, he has this Advantage, that if among all the Instances he brings to invalidate all the Vulgar Doctrines of those he Disputes with, anyone be Irrefragable, that alone is sufficient to overthrow a Doctrine which Universally asserts what he opposes.[12] 

 

According to this account, what characterises scepticism is not a particular hypothesis, nor the rejection of other hypotheses, but the fact that it approaches all hypotheses in a particular way: it is the sceptic’s “work to suggest doubts about the opinion he questions.” One way of doing that is by confronting “several hypotheses about the same thing,” pit them against each other, in order to determine which one comes through as the most “probable.” And while doing this, the sceptic always “holds the negative,” that is to say, never embraces and always doubts whichever hypothesis is presented to him. At no point in this eminently practical account of the sceptic’s role is the sceptic understood to adopt any position at all, or to embrace or reject any hypothesis for reasons of his own. Indeed, in a sense, the sceptic does not even really self-identify as a sceptic. Hence, from quite early on, we learn that Carneades is “resolved to make good the part [he has] undertaken of a Sceptick”[13] and that he “must resume the person of a Sceptick, and as such, propose some part of what may be either distink’t, or at least doubted on the common Hypothesis of the Chymists.”[14] Later in the work, Carneades yet again “hastens to resume the person of a Sceptick.”[15] All these passages suggest that the “sceptic” is less a philosophical identity that Carneades has, than it is a role or persona that Boyle’s avatar chooses to play in the dialogue, namely as an opponent of every other position and not a proponent of any position of his own. As Boyle write in the preface: “if I have made my Sceptick sometimes speak sleightingly of the Opinions he opposes, I hope it will not be found that I have done any more, than became the Part he was to act of an Opponent.”[16]

 

Glanvill, too, embraces a method of “Confesd ignorance” in order to eradicate overly “abstractive Contemplations.”[17] Still, he takes offence to Thomas White’s associating his position in the Vanity of Dogmatizing to “a criminal and dangerous Scepticism.[18] White, of course, could be forgiven for attributing at least some form of scepticism to Glanvill, given the latter’s lukewarm repudiation of the school in the preface to the Vanity of Dogmatizing:

 

If anything seem to you to savour too much of the Pyrrhonian: I hope you’l consider, that Scepticism is less reprehensible in enquiring years, and no crime in a Juvenile exercitation. But I have no design against Science: my indeavour is to promote it. Confidence in uncertainties, is the greatest enemy to what is certain; and were I a Sceptick, I’de plead for Dogmatizing: For the way to bring men to stick to nothing, is confidently to perswade them to swallow all things.[19]

 

However, in the “Remarques on the title” prefacing the later Scepsis Scientifica, Glanvill more forcefully proclaims that he “should never have thought [him]self concern’d in a Book, that wears such a Title”  and promises to show how “unjust ‘tis to suggest that I am a Sceptick.” His “profession is freedom of enquiry,” he proclaims, and he “own[s] no more Scepticism then what is concluded in the Motto which the ROYAL SOCIETY have now adopted for theirs, NULLIUS IN VERBA.[20] In fact, on Glanvill’s own account, White’s analysis is a case of “misapplyed appellations” due to the fact that “that this learned Man had an other notion of Sceptick then was usual.”[21] His mistake lies in having misinterpreted his healthy scientific caution for an “endeavou[r] to discourage Philosophical enquiries, by introducing a despair of Science.[22] In fact, for Glanvill, there are two kinds of scepticism in play. On the one hand, there is the “deadly Pyrrhonical contagion, and an enemy to Science[23] that he rejects no less than White, but that White mistakenly attributes to both Descartes and experimental philosophers like Glanvill himself. On the other hand, there is a sceptical attitude which is “harmless and peaceable,” which is the one Glanvill adopts in The Vanity of Dogmatizing.[24]

 

In relation to these two cases, it is perhaps tempting to mobilise the notion of “constructive or mitigated scepticism” proposed by Richard Popkin to distinguish the stance paradigmatically adopted by Mersenne and Gassendi against the “pyrrhonian” scepticism of a figure like François La Mothe Le Vayer.[25] Doing so would, however, be a mistake. For Popkin, “mitigated scepticism” is a theory of knowledge which assigns particular boundaries to human knowledge, namely which denies “necessary truths about the nature of reality, and yet allow for the possibility of knowledge in a lesser sense, as convincing or probable truths about appearances.”[26] That is, however, not what is at stake in Boyle and Glanvill. In both cases, scepticism is not an epistemology or a theory of knowledge at all. It is a kind of knowledge practice, an attitude or mental habit more than an asserted doctrinal position. Moreover, it is an argumentative strategy more than a method of investigation, impossible to understand adequately outside a framework of dispute or controversy. In short, “scepticism” is principally a form of argument that they deploy against others as a form of resistance to dogmatism. In its “dangerous” form, it can lead to epistemological despair. But in its “innocent” form, it liberates from dogmatism and helps embrace a freer form of inquiry.

 

Parker, I believe, shares this practical definition of scepticism which helps explain better than does Kargon’s analysis Parker’s appeal to “despairing scepticism” in the Free and Impartial Censure. The solution, it seems to me, lies in considering Parker’s alleged “admission” not as a statement of his own position but as a central element in an argumentative strategy against frivolous hypothesising (and frivolous only, for not all hypothesising is so.) To be concise, the strategy corresponds exactly to what Parker, in the title of his work, refers to as “impartial censure.” In the Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion & Goodnesse, written at the same time as A Free and Impartial Censure and closely related to it, Parker thus proposes the following approach to frivolous hypothesis makers:

 

Now had I a mind to set up for a Maker of Hypotheses, (which you see is but an easie trade) I might so trim and adorn this with artificial and affected Phrases, and so support it with a set of Theorems, Pillars, and Fundamental Principles, as to make it appear a competently handsome and well built Structure. […] But if any Origenist shall disapprove my Hypothesis, I only challenge him to confute it, for I am sure the like arguments will confute his own: and therefore to shew him the Vanity of inventing groundless and imaginary Hypotheses, I will be so cross-grain’d as not to abandon mine, as long as he shall persist peremptory in his.[27]

The polemical use of hypotheses Parker envisages here is strikingly non-committal. It aims not at all at convincing an adversary of the truth of some hypothesis one has advanced. A hypothesis is only put forward to goad an adversary into specifying their own competing hypothesis and in that process themselves realise the falsity of whatever it is they maintain. In short, positing a hypothesis is an argumentative strategy one can deploy in order to encourage an opponent to self-destruct. It is a ruse. As an experienced polemicist, Parker was aware of the counterproductive effects of trying to force the assent of others, of the “violence and injury they suffer from our presumptuous forcing them to be parties in our own trivial and imaginary speculations.”[28] He knew that the reaction of adversaries to an evidently better argument was often neither to concur nor to concede, but to resist and resent. The alternative strategy he envisages to engage an otherwise reluctant adversary, unwilling to engage with one’s better argument against their hypothesis, then consists in adopting provisionally an opposing, but equally frivolous, hypothesis for the sole purpose of luring the adversary into destroying their own. While the strategy makes active use of hypotheses, at no point does it imply subscribing to any. The strategy is highly reminiscent of an approach to controversy perhaps best exemplified in the early modern period by a thinker such as Pierre Bayle.[29] If understood in the context of such a strategy, when Parker provisionally declares himself a “despairing sceptic,” we should thus not take that as a statement of his position proper, but as the move of a talented controversialist designed to make opposing, but equally frivolous hypotheses mutually destroy each other. Parker’s own position is not even in play. And such non-committal staging of contrary hypotheses corresponds, I suspect, to what Parker understands by “impartial censure,” exactly because he at no point invests his own position in the debate.

 

Throughout Parker’s writings, this sceptical approach to the refutation of others runs parallel to his own more constructive method and theory of knowledge.[xxx] It was first articulated in the context of his early contributions to natural philosophy and theology, in the 1665 Impartial Censure and the 1666 Account. However, as also this constructive method, the sceptical approach carries over into the theological and political domain that dominates his later production. For a good example, we can turn to the 1670 Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity where Parker explicitly explains how “’tis the design of this Discourse by a fair and impartial Debate to compose all their Differences, adjust all their quarrels and contentions, and settle things upon their true and proper foundations.”[31] By “composing differences” and “adjusting quarrels,” Parker sets out to clear the doctrinal field by pitting equally frivolous positions against each other while claiming a kind of impartiality for himself, exactly as he describes the sceptical strategy in the 1666 Account. In the event, it plays out in a confrontation between puritan and Hobbesian theological politics. On the one hand, Parker exposes the “hypotheses of orthodoxy” established by “proud and imperious” divines who “set up their own Pedantick Systems and Institutions for the Standards of Divine Truth” while “not regarding the Princes Power” and the “great article of the “Supremacy of the Civil Power in Religious matter.”[32] On the other hand, regarding “Mr. Hobs” and his “Hypothesis concerning the Nature and Original of Government,” Parker claims that its “Absurdity [is] demonstrated from its Inconsistency with the Natural Constitution of Things.”[33] There is of course considerable distance between puritan reliance on self-defined orthodoxy and Hobbesian conventionalism, even for Parker. One the one hand, we have those with “fine Dreams and Hypotheses of a warm brain” who entirely “miss the necessary Rules of Life, and the most useful measures of practicable Policy.”[34] On the other hand,  we have the “philosophers”—Hobbes, in the event—who “grant such Fundamental Suppositions, as are apparently false and incongruous, and repugnant to the Real State of things.”[35] Yet, their doctrines represent equal ways of replacing the dictates of right reason and the law of nature with mere “self-interest.” In the case of the puritans this occurs surreptitiously under the pretext of an orthodoxy defined to serve their own goals. In the case of Hobbes, it occurs more overtly by positing the drive for self-preservation as the sole principle of natural law.[36] Consequently, when confronting them, a puritan critique of Hobbesianism will ultimately also affect puritanism itself, and vice versa. And this is exactly what Parker sets out to do in the Discourse when “composing their differences” and “adjusting their quarrel.” Rejecting both hypotheses, Parker contents himself with demonstrating how, when pitted against each other, they will equally fall apart under the weight of their own arguments. All the while, Parker himself stays on side-lines, never intervening but only adjucating. In short, without investing his own position in the debate, he subjects them to a sceptical “impartial censure,” thus clearing the field for his own approach.

 

MOGENS LAERKE

 

 

 

[1] Samuel Parker was nominated fellow of the Royal Society by John Wilkins on 23 May and admitted on 13 June 1666. See Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society (London: A. Millar, 1756), vol. II, p. 90 and 96).

[2] S. Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford: Printed by R. Hall, for W. Davis, 1666), p. 57.

[3] Ibid., p. 45.

[4] Ibid, p. 56 and p. 84.

[5] Ibid., p. 57. Note also that disputation VI of Parker’s 1678 Disputationes de Deo et providentia divina contains a refutation of Descartes’s Meditations as a form of scepticism.

[6] Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure, p. 44.

[7] R. H. Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 111.

[8] Parker, Free and Impartial Censure, p. 44–45.

[9] Ibid., p. 44–46.

[10] See B. J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 49.

[11] J. Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London: Printed by E. C. for Henry Eversden , 1661); J. Glanvill, Scepsis scientifica, or, Confest ignorance, the way to science in an essay of The vanity of dogmatizing, and confident opinion: with a reply to the exceptions of the learned Thomas Albius (London, Printed by E. C. for Henry Eversden, 1665).

[12] Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (London: Printed by J. Cadwell for J. Crooke, 1661), Preface. The Sceptical Chymist is not the only place where Boyle appeals to scepticism. His 1665 An Examen of Antiperistasis as it wont to be Taught and Prov’d from 1665 carries a postscriptum entitled “A Sceptical Consideration of the Heat of Cellars in Winter, and their Coldness in Summer.” In 1673, he moreover wrote A Sceptical Dialogue about the Positive or Privative Nature of Cold.

[13] Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, I, p. 35.

[14] Ibid. I, p. 47.

[15] Ibid., I, p. 185.

[16] Ibid., “A Præface Introductory.”

[17] Glanvill cit. in J. Davies, Science in and Enchanted World (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 149.

[18] Glanvill, Scepsis scientifica, “Remarques on the title.”

[19] Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, “To the Reverend.”

[20] Glanvill, Scepsis scientifica, “Remarques on the title.”

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Popkin, The History of Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 112-127, here p. 112.

[26] Ibid., p. 111.

[27] Parker, Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion (Oxford: Printed by W. Hall for R. Davis, 1666), p. 53–54; see also p. 58–59.

[28] Ibid., p. 98.

[29] See Bayle’s texts on the self-unravelling of reason in Dictionnaire historique et critique, ed. Adrien-Jean-Quentin Beuchot (Paris: Desoer, 1820), Art. “Acosta,” rem. G., vol. I, p. 191; and Art. “Bunel,” rem. E, vol. IV, p. 254. For some commentary, see M. Lærke, Les Lumières de Leibniz. Controverses at Huet, Bayle, Regis et More (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2015), p. 270–272.

[30] On this constructive side of Parker’s method, see M. Lærke, “The Proleptic Principles of Samuel Parker,” Esrly Science and Medecine 30 (2025), p. 237–271.

[31] S. Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 2nd ed. (London: John Martyn, 1671), p. 10. The first edition appeared in November 1699, with 1670 indicated on the title page.

[32] Ibid., p. 56–57.

[33] Ibid., p. 11–12, p. 117–118.

[34] Ibid., p. xlv.

[35] Ibid., p. 119.

[36] Ibid., p. 120.

 

Research for this blog post was funded by the European Union (NOTCOM, ERC Advanced Grant no. 101052433). Views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the European Union nor of the ERC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for any of the views expressed herein.

Mogens Lærke
Mogens Lærke

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Mogens Lærke (July 12, 2025). What is “Impartial Censure”? A Note on Samuel Parker’s Use of Scepticism. NOTCOM. Retrieved June 16, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14cd1


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