To a wider audience, Francis Bacon is best known for his critique of the “idols” – the biases and heuristics to which the mind is prone due to its inherent limitations, as well as the distorting effects of language, culture, and authority. For philosophers of science, however, Bacon is significant for something more ambitious: the inductive method, that is, a reform of how knowledge is produced, and – with it – what we might call the early modern “experimental turn”. These themes are central to Novum Organum (1620), which Bacon published as the second part of the unfinished Instauratio Magna. By offering a “new instrument” of inquiry in contrast to Aristotle’s Organon, Bacon positions his project against the later dogmatic formalism of scholasticism and calls for the replacement of inherited logical routines with systematic investigation of nature. The present paper, however, begins from a different set of questions. Institutional epistemology, as a contemporary niche within epistemology and philosophy of science, examines how epistemic labor is divided in large-scale research systems, and how information propagates through epistemic networks. Models of communication structures suggest that patterns of information exchange can decisively affect how – and how quickly – communities converge toward truth, under what conditions they sustain pluralism of hypotheses, and how they avoid the premature stabilization of an erroneous consensus (K. J. S. Zollman). These issues are directly relevant to what is today called “Big Science”, as exemplified by projects such as CERN and LIGO. Such large and expensive enterprises are epistemically organized collective undertakings in which the collection, quality control, processing, interpretation, and checking of information are distributed across specialized functions. In many STEM settings, these institutional–epistemic dimensions are treated as mere “logistics”, even though the design of such structures bears on the reliability and optimality of discovery – and, by extension, on the public justification of enormous financial investment. The societal value of Big Science is therefore a function not only of “brilliant ideas”, but also of institutions capable of turning those ideas into robust, cumulative results. Bacon is among the first thinkers to anticipate this family of problems. Science will not advance steadily through the mere availability of a “better method” unless there exists an institution that makes its sustained use possible. I begin with a brief sketch of the scientific–technological context of the early seventeenth century: navigation increasingly shaped by astronomical tables and more precise cartography; the development of optical instruments and more standardized measurement practices; printing networks that multiply technical manuals and observational reports; and mechanical and artisanal innovations – from mining and metallurgy to glassmaking and shipbuilding. This expanding body of empirical material remained dispersed, lacking reliable mechanisms of archiving, comparison, and coordination. Against the backdrop of the growing gap between the “practical” and the “learned” worlds, Bacon argues that the knowledge institutions of his day had become self-sustaining and closed systems – hence, reforming the environment of inquiry is as important as reforming method itself. I then revisit Bacon’s metaphor of ants, spiders, and bees – usually read in Novum Organum as an illustration of the relation between empiricism and rationalism – and interpret it instead as an early intuition about the functional division of epistemic tasks and about the fact that “knowledge” emerges in the middle layer of research: in the transformation of raw material into an ordered, testable, and transmissible result. Bacon develops this institutional idea more fully in New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1626), a work that never achieved the same canonical status as Novum Organum, in part because it was long treated primarily as a literary utopia rather than as a foundational sketch of institutional epistemology. I argue that the core of New Atlantis – Salomon’s House – functions as a proto-model of a research institute in which epistemic roles, information flow, experimental selection, and the dissemination of results are institutionally organized. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, I reconstruct Bacon’s division of research roles (“Merchants of Light”, “Depredators”, “Mystery-men”, “Pioneers or Miners”, “Compilers”, “Dowry-men”, “Lamps”, “Inoculators”, and “Interpreters of Nature”) and argue for the epistemic rationale – indeed, the optimality – of this particular partition. Second, I examine Bacon’s understanding of how an “institution of knowledge” relates to society and political authority: how knowledge is governed, when and how results are disclosed or withheld, how institutional support is rhetorically secured, and what might be called a “strategy of patronage” – in contemporary terms, a politics of research funding – through which large, costly systems are justified to rulers (as sources of power) and to the public (as sources of security and prosperity). Finally, and with the greatest possible care to avoid anachronism, I assess the relevance of Bacon’s insights for contemporary Big Science. I do not claim that Bacon “predicted” CERN; rather, I argue that he identified durable structural analogies in problems that persist across the history of science: the division of epistemic labor, the institutional production of reliable results, mechanisms of accumulation and transmission, and the balance between truth for its own sake (“light”) and social usefulness (“fruit”). On this basis, I conclude that Bacon grasped – four centuries ago – something Big Science today often treats as implicit: the organization of research is not an administrative, extra-scientific add-on, but one of the central topics of the epistemology of science.
Petar Nurkić (Thu,) studied this question.