ABSTRACT
Archaeologists speak of ‘reading the past’, and this is usually taken to be a non-realist view about the past – we can only read the world as constructed through our languages. But the metaphor of the world as text is not original to the decon-structions of the twentieth century. Ironically it was the metaphor that underpinned an ideological defence of realism about natural science in the seventeenth century. Galileo said that God wrote the book of nature in the language of mathematics; and Francis Bacon spoke of the ‘alphabet of nature’, by which he meant that the ultimate atoms were letters combining into words combining into well-formed sentences, all of which constituted the ‘grammar’ of the laws of nature. This metaphor, however, did not imply a two-way dialogue between symmetric participants in language, as do our differing interpretations of the world, but a one-way communication of truth from God to humankind. Spiritual truth is written for us in the Scriptures; secular truth is written in the world, but obscurely, so that it has to be decoded from immediately sensed phenomena. The method of recovery was the new experimental philosophy, according to which all subjectivity and prejudice must be stripped from our eyes and we must ‘put nature to the question’ to elicit her hidden secrets by experiment, often aided by instruments of observation: telescopes, microscopes, pendulums, alchemical reactions, lodestones, etc. Bacon claimed that his inductive logic gave the recipe for doing this.
