Book Chapter

Lost in the Woods: Francis Bacon’s Errant Pathways in Knowledge

  • Vera Keller

Recovering Bacon’s valorization of error can shed light on his epistemology as a whole, and even on that of research more generally. Bacon is often known popularly as having established a scientific method to direct inquiry efficiently towards reliable knowledge and useful ends. In the period, however, experimentation already entailed husbanding resources and serving the useful ends of household management. By contrast, Bacon extended the length and sophistication of investigation in ways that deferred immediate use and that advised investigators to pursue bizarre and often resource-intensive approaches. Bacon supported what we would now call curiosity-driven research by encouraging investigators to wander in the pathways of error. Notably, however, he discussed error not in his interpretation of the myth of Daedalus, whose labyrinth commonly symbolized error, but rather in his reading of the myth of Proteus in which the investigator provokes matter (Proteus) into a state of error so that matter and its investigator might struggle together. For Bacon, rather than something to be escaped by following the clue of Ariadne, error was a state in which the human had to be immersed. In this way, Bacons reading of the myth of Proteus did gender experimentation, as Carolyn Merchant has argued, but not in the ways that Merchant claimed. By rejecting the useful and efficient forms of experimentation practiced by women within the household, Bacon made experimentation into a gendered, ongoing struggle through the valorization of error.

  • Keywords:
  • research,
  • Francis Bacon,
  • gender,
  • labyrinth,
  • Proteus,
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Vera Keller

University of Oregon, United States - ORCID: 0000-0002-9933-4590

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  • Publication Year: 2023
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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Lost in the Woods: Francis Bacon’s Errant Pathways in Knowledge

Authors

Vera Keller

Language

Italian

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4.06

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Authors

Marco Faini, Marco Sgarbi

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

145

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4

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979-12-215-0265-7

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Knowledge and its Histories

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