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.
University of Oregon, United States - ORCID: 0000-0002-9933-4590
Titolo del capitolo
Lost in the Woods: Francis Bacon’s Errant Pathways in Knowledge
Autori
Vera Keller
Lingua
Italian
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4.06
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Errors, False Opinions and Defective Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Autori
Marco Faini, Marco Sgarbi
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
145
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0265-7
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0266-4
eISBN (epub)
979-12-215-0267-1
Collana
Knowledge and its Histories