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

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    Author(s)
    Keller, Vera
    Language
    Italian
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    Abstract
    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.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89190
    Keywords
    research; Francis Bacon; gender; labyrinth; Proteus
    DOI
    10.36253/979-12-215-0266-4.06
    ISBN
    9791221502664, 9791221502664
    Publisher
    Firenze University Press
    Publisher website
    https://www.fupress.com/
    Publication date and place
    Florence, 2023
    Series
    Knowledge and its Histories, 2
    Pages
    20
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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