Certainty, laws and facts in Francis Bacon’s jurisprudence

SILVIA MANZO

Berlín

Workshop; Max- Planck- Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Colloquium Department II; 2009

Max-Planck-Institut für Wissensachfatsgeschichte

The convergence of the legal tradition with the early-modern epistemic categories of natural science has become a shared view among historians of science. With different nuances and from diverse analysis, historians agree to maintain that the interaction of law and natural philosophy contributed to originate distinctive conceptual categories such as facts, certainty, and probability during the early-modern period.  From this historiographical account, Francis Bacon  has been highlighted as one of the most influential authors who merged legal thinking with natural science. His idea of natural history and his project of a restored natural philosophy are undoubtedly permeated with legal overtones. Bacon was both an active professional jurist, engaged in the legal debates of the day, and a philosopher, deeply committed to the renovation of natural philosophy. Notwithstanding, despite that this double character of Bacon as a jurist and Bacon as a natural philosopher has attracted the attention of several scholars,  relatively little has been said about the concrete ways in which Bacon’s legal training played as background of the particular epistemic notions involved in his scientific program.In order to understand how legal thinking actually affected Bacon’s scientific program, it would be necessary firstly to elucidate the epistemic categories evolved in his legal thinking and the practices connected to them, particularly those relevant to natural philosophy and natural history. One of those categories was certainty. Legal certainty is implicated at least in two momentous issues of early-modern jurisprudence: 1) the certainty of law –concerning the clear meaning and the interpretation of laws; 2) the certainty of facts –respecting to the establishing of legal facts. An historical study of early-modern legal certainty, therefore, should focus on laws as well as on facts. Although Bacon was conversant with these two dimensions of legal certainty, dealt often with them and was deeply involved with problems arisen from them, he never defined nor described the kind of certainty typical of laws and facts. His elusive notions of certainty have to be traced through his large legal theoretical corpus and his multiple interventions in legal cases.  The aim of this paper is to find out the notions of certainty assumed in Bacon’s jurisprudence.  Accordingly, the first part of the paper deals with the concept of the certainty the of law entailed in Bacon’s law reform project, and exhibits how he put his attempts to make law certain into practice. The second part of the paper provides a survey of Bacon’s perspectives on the certainty about facts and looks for their vestiges in his practices as a lawyer. In doing so, I try to answer the following questions: Are laws and facts thought to be “certain” in the same sense? What are the practices laying behind the notion(s) of legal certainty? What I want to do here is to share with you the very first results of a wider research which aims to answer more general questions like “do Bacon’s notions of legal certainty have any continuity with the kinds of certainty assumed in his natural history (facts) and his natural philosophy (laws)?”