Francis Bacon

In Reinventing Knowledge — From Alexandria To The Internet, Francis Bacon is the “English courtier” who, under conditions of uncertainty, offered “the only sensible prescriptions: focus on facts, reserve judgment, discipline your imagination, and resist the urge to theorize.” The book credits the inductive or Scientific Method he developed with raising the defining questions of how new knowledge could be legitimated — how bogus claims could be separated from verifiable ones, and how coarse facts could be smoothed into the general theoretical understandings an ordered mind craves. He appears as a pivotal figure in the book’s larger account of how new institutions and methods have repeatedly reinvented the production and validation of knowledge.

Context: Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an English philosopher and statesman, a founder of empiricism and the inductive scientific method, whose works (including the Novum Organum) shaped the modern conception of experimental science.

Where this appears

• Reinventing Knowledge — From Alexandria To The Internet — credited with the inductive Scientific Method prescriptions that anchor the book’s account of legitimating new knowledge