ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the seriousness with which the early Fellows of the Royal Society attempted to implement Bacon's program for the reform of knowledge in their collective activity and the influence this had on their scientific activity and publications. It argues that tracing the influence of methodological doctrines requires teasing out productive tensions in methodological writings of Royal Society members. The common commitment of the Royal Society and Hooke to Baconian method explains both their agreement on the rules of method and their conflict over its interpretation. Bacon's view of "things" served as a metaphorical ontology enabling nature to speak once the interference of the idols had been checked. The injunction to focus on "things" themselves has at least three different connotations: specular, manual, and generative. The chapter also argues that Bacon's philosophy of science incorporated three different conceptions of knowledge: empiricism, constructivism, and theoretical realism, corresponding to three different metaphors of "things themselves".
