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'''Criticizing the Aristotelian Worldview'''

Although the Aristotelian mosaic that was accepted during Bacon’s education provided a deductive description of the physical world from a set of axioms in each discipline, from as early as 1603, Bacon’s writing shows that he thought that it lacked a universal structure; there was no general way of doing science that was common across all subjects.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] In particular, he believed that it was too greatly based on metaphysical foundations; there was a strong focus on natural modes of action rather than on the actual phenomena observed. In this sense, Bacon thought that the Aristotelian worldview was overly presumptuous in terms of the knowledge we are capable of gaining about the physical world. Several followers of the Aristotelian worldview, such as Telesio, sought to reformulate it with a more well-founded basis however, Bacon was still not content with their resolutions. In Bacon’s Valerius Terminus, one can see that he argues that natural philosophy and divinity should be disconnected from one another, thereby further criticizing the accepted scientific mosaic which contained theology as one of its cornerstones.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]]

'''Empiricism and the Baconian Methodology'''

In his Novum Organum, Bacon introduced his “true directions concerning the interpretation of nature”.[[CiteRef::Bacon (1878)]] This text was his normative manual for how he believed science should be done and in it, he lays the foundations for what would become the first empiricist methodology of science. It was in this text that Bacon first introduces the notion that scientists could learn about the world, rather than by thinking about it intuitively as was the Aristotelian tradition, but by making observations, collecting evidence, and then using this evidence to inductively make generalized claims about the world.[[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]] This inductive approach was new to science and, although not initially accepted, eventually became a foundational element of how scientists conducted their research. Bacon argued that, under similar conditions, similar phenomena occur and so, if we seek to understand how the world works, we need to look at the conditions that lead to certain phenomena and generalize these observations to make causal statements about how the physical world behaves.

'''The Idols'''

In Bacon’s celebrated Novum Organum, he describes a version of what is known as the problem of sensations. He said that, in perceiving the world, the human mind is subject to certain imperceptible faults that deceive our perceptions and sensations of the world around us which he refers to as idols.[[CiteRef::Bacon (1878)]][[CiteRef::Klein (2016)]]