The establishing of facts in Francis Bacon’s natural histories

MANZO, SILVIA

Londres

Conferencia; II International Seminar on Francis Bacon; 2001

Queen Mary, University of London

Every fact collected in Bacon’s natural histories belongs necessarily to each of this three groups: certain facts, dubious facts or false facts. In the following I will try to show the criteria for deciding when a fact should belong to one of these groups. At the same time I will deal with Bacon’s concepts of certainty, probability and credibility since the classification of facts is grounded on them.