Francis Bacon's Skeptical Recipes for New Knowledge
In “Francis Bacon’s Skeptical Recipes for New Knowledge” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), I try to
• Provide a sympathetic narrative about skepticism from ancient times
• Show how skepticism helps us gather new knowledge in modern science
• Elaborate a new account of scientific methodology to show how scientists sometimes manage to find true models of reality
• Contrast this new way with ‘coherence theories’ of knowledge, which cannot locate truth
• Suggest a new solution to the empirical under-determination problem
• Illustrate how the new method was successfully applied in a famous model of light.
The publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, describes my effort as “ambitious.” Please wish me luck.
Then please also point out its deficiencies.
A draft Preface to a sequel to this book is under revision. It is linked on the next page. The sequel is to be called “Isaac Newton’s Experimental Astronomy, and how his method disappeared mysteriously from methodology"”