Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The scientific methods of Francis Bacon.
  • noun The theory that Francis Bacon was the real author of the works of Shakespeare.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Baconian +‎ -ism

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Examples

  • Just as telling, reflecting the scholarly shift over the past 30 years, are entries that no longer exist, such as Baconianism; Faith, hope, and charity; and Uniformitarianism and catastrophism.

    AvaxHome RSS: 2009

  • Baconianism is used to describe the position, common with evangelicals and fundamentalists back to the 1700s, that only direct eyewitness observation is science, all else is “theory”, i.e. unreliable pointless guessing, so we might as well prefer “GodDidIt”.

    Hunter: not young earther. Agnostic-age earther? - The Panda's Thumb 2009

  • Hunter is an explicit proponent of Baconianism in his books.

    Hunter: not young earther. Agnostic-age earther? - The Panda's Thumb 2009

  • Long live naive Baconianism! but then throw in something really wild just to make sure you are paying attention.

    ACSI v. Stearns, aka Wendell Bird vs. UC - The Panda's Thumb 2007

  • But then towards the end he falls right back into fundamentalist naive Baconianism when he starts spewing all kinds of relativist nonsense about scientific theories just being likely stories that can be he implies easily kicked aside when they conflict with your Bible reading.

    Irony of the day: John Mark Reynolds - The Panda's Thumb 2007

  • Thanks to the work of many researchers we are beginning to appreciate that the revival of serious intellectual interest in magic in the sixteenth century was an important movement of thought — as influential in the early history of science as Baconianism.

    III: Seeing the Invisible Hill, Christopher 1973

  • Even today it can be a salutary lesson to recall the central ideas of Baconianism — and so prevent the analysis of the alienating and inhuman aspects of the contemporary world from issuing in a decadent and pessimistic revulsion from work and civilization, or in a mystical awaiting of a mythical future in which the “pleasure principle” will have triumphed at last over the “reality principle.”

    BACONIANISM PAOLO ROSSI 1968

  • The taste for observations and experiments, the tri - umph of experimental over theoretical physics, the slackening of interest in geometry, and the inadequacy of Cartesianism — all these contribute to explain the extraordinary prestige of Baconianism among the men of the Enlightenment, even though there were funda - mental differences between the judgments of

    BACONIANISM PAOLO ROSSI 1968

  • Controversy over Baco - nian ideas seems alive even today: the expounders of the so-called critical theory of society still see in Bacon or in Baconianism the symbol of the impious Pro - methean and Faustian ideal of a total instrumental mechanization of reality.

    BACONIANISM PAOLO ROSSI 1968

  • Finally, it ought to be remembered by exces - sively severe critics of Baconianism that the progress of modern anatomy, embryology, botany, zoology, and mineralogy was intimately associated with a Baconian insistence on observation and experiments, and with

    BACONIANISM PAOLO ROSSI 1968

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