Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon was an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist regarded as the father of empiricism and a pioneer of the scientific method. His Novum Organum argued that the traditional Aristotelian method of deductive reasoning should be replaced by a systematic method of inductive inference from observations and experiments. Bacon identified four "idols" — cognitive biases that distort human understanding — and proposed a systematic program of natural history to ground knowledge in controlled observation.