i The best one could do in Latin is ‘The world is the totality of true judgements (sententiae) not of things’ – but this is a quite different claim, as judgements are made while facts are not, and sententiae would include value judgements, such as ‘murder is wrong.’

ii ‘… an Indigested Heap of Particulars’; ‘we desire that Men should learne and perceive, how severe a Thing the true Inquisition of Nature is; And should accustome themselves, by the light of Particulars, to enlarge their Mindes, to the Amplitude of the World; And not reduce the World to the Narrownesse of their Mindes.’ Bacon, Sylva sylvarum (1627), A1r, 74.

iii According to Bruno Latour, the great French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard held that ‘un fait est fait’ – a fact is an artefact, or facts are made (Latour, ‘The Force and the Reason of Experiment’ (1990), 63). But I can’t find the phrase in Bachelard. So, too, Steven Shapin attributes to Ludwik Fleck the view that facts are made or invented (Shapin, ‘A View of Scientific Thought’ (1980)), but the language is not Fleck’s. Latour and Shapin want to convey the idea that facts are made, but without taking responsibility for it. Pierre Bourdieu has complained about those who adopt ‘a typical strategy, that of advancing a very radical position (of the type: the scientific fact is a construction or – slippage – a fabrication, and therefore an artefact, a fiction) before beating a retreat, in the face of criticism, back to banalities, that is, to the more ordinary face of ambiguous notions like “construction”, etc.’ (Bourdieu, Science of Science (2004), 26–7).

iv Postmodernists often assume that because facts are expressed in language they are inherently contestable. Thus Jonathan Goldberg declares his opposition to those who ‘suppose … that there are certain unquestionable facts; rather than allowing that what counts as factual is itself a discursive formation’ (Goldberg, ‘Speculations: Macbeth and Source’ (1987), 244). It should be obvious that facts can both be unquestionable and only have meaning within certain discursive conventions: e.g. Washington is the capital of the United States of America, or 1 centimetre equals approximately 0.39 inches.

v See p. 234.

vi One might think that Renaissance authors simply weren’t very concerned with being consistent. I don’t think this is right; inconsistency is often (but not in this case!) the result of our misinterpreting what they are saying. For a striking example, compare Stephen Orgel’s interpretation of Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia (1615) on the anatomical differences between the sexes, in the course of which Orgel claims that for Crooke ‘the scientific truth or falsehood’ of an argument is simply not an issue, that he sees ‘no need to reconcile the conflicting scientific arguments’, with the result that he is quite happy to propound arguments which are mutually incompatible (indeed, in Orgel’s view, consistency is a ‘post-Enlightenment’ virtue), with Janet Adelman’s rebuttal: Orgel, Impersonations (1996), 21–4; Adelman, ‘Making Defect Perfection’ (1999), 36–9 and n. 29.

vii ‘For God the first cause and beginner of things, as Macrobius saith, of his own fruitfulnesse hath created and brought forth a Spirit, the Spirit brought forth a Soul (but the truth of Christianity saith otherwise), the Soul is furnished partly with reason, which it bestows up Divine things, as heaven and the stars (for therefore are they said to have Divine Spirits) and partly with sensitive and vegetative powers, which it bestows upon frail and transitory things. Thus much Virgil well perceiving, calleth this Spirit, The soul of the World … But the truth of Christianity holdeth that the Souls do not proceed from the Spirit, but even immediately from God himself.’ Della Porta, Natural Magick (1658), 7–8.

viii Reginald Scot naturally seized on this story in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584).

ix For later accounts of the same device, Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance (2011), 1–2; Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), 202–4.

x A phrase later made famous by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire in the variant form Hic Rhodus, hic salta. (For an account of the derivation of Marx’s phrase in a pun by Hegel, http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html, accessed 22 Dec. 2014.)

xi The epistemological sloppiness that, in Western culture, characterizes references to experience before the Scientific Revolution is not a necessary characteristic of pre-scientific societies. The Matses, an Amazonian tribe, are obliged to specify, whenever they use a verb, ‘exactly how they come to know about the facts they are reporting … There are separate verbal forms depending on whether you are reporting direct experience (you saw someone passing by with your own eyes), something inferred from evidence (you saw footprints on the sand), conjecture (people always pass by at that time of day) or hearsay (your neighbour told you he had seen someone passing by). If a statement is reported with the incorrect evidentiality form, it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would answer in the past tense and would say something like … “There were two last time I checked.” ’ (Deutscher, Through the Language Glass (2010), 153)

xii Horace, Epistles I.i, lines 14–15:

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri,

quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.

‘I am not bound to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.’ See p. 44.

xiii Let me add as an aside that a word that we think of as naturally paired with the word ‘fact’, the word ‘fiction’, enters English in the 1590s; the term ‘fiction’ predates the modern idea of fact.

xiv The three occasions on which Florio follows Montaigne are: ‘I have no body to blame for my faultes or misfortunes, but my selfe. For in effect I seldome use the advise of other[s] unlesse it be for complements sake, and where I have need of instruction or knowledge of the fact’ (Montaigne, Essayes (1613), 456); ‘True it is, that proofes and reasons grounded upon the fact and experience. [sic] I untie not: for indeede they have no end; but often cut them, as Alexander did his knotte’ (582); ‘And were it not, that what I doe for want of memorie, others more often doe the same for lacke of faith, I would ever in a matter of fact rather take the truth from anothers mouth, then from mine owne’ (605). But where Montaigne has ‘Je vois ordinairement que les hommes, aux faicts qu’on leur propose, s’amusent plus volontiers à en chercher la raison qu’à en chercher la verité’, Florio has ‘I ordinarily see, that men, in matters proposed them, doe more willingly ammuze and busie themselves in seeking out the reasons, than in searching out the trueth of them’(578). And where Montaigne has ‘joinct qu’à la verité il est un peu rude et quereleux de nier tout sec une proposition de faict’, Florio has ‘since truely, it is a rude and quarelous humour, flatly to deny a proposition’ (579).

xv In modern English there are two distinct words, ‘human’ and ‘humane’, but in seventeenth-century English there is one word, usually spelt ‘humane’, with two distinct meanings. ‘Humane’ here, and in the title of Locke’s Essay, means ‘human’.

xvi ‘[I]f a Man seeth in present that which he hath seen before, he thinks that that which was antecedent to that which he saw before, is also antecedent to that he presently seeth: As for Example, He that hath seen the Ashes remain after the Fire, and now again seeth ashes, concludeth again there hath been Fire: And this is called again Conjecture of the past, or Presumption of the Fact … When a Man hath so often observed like Antecedents to be followed by like Consequents, that whensoever he seeth the Antecedent, he looketh again for the Consequent; or when he seeth the Consequent, maketh account there hath been the like Antecedent; then he calleth both the Antecedent and the Consequent, Signs one of another, as Clouds are Signs of Rain to come, and Rain of Clouds past’ (Hobbes, Humane Nature (1650), 37–8); ‘ … there be two Kinds of Knowledge, whereof the one is nothing else but Sense, or Knowledge original … and Remembrance of the same; the other is called Science or Knowledge of the Truth of Propositions, and how Things are called; and is derived from Understanding … And of these two Kinds of Knowledge, whereof the former is Experience of Fact, and the later of Evidence of Truth; as the former, if it be great, is called Prudence; so the latter, if it be much, hath usually been called, both by Ancient and Modern Writers, Sapience or Wisdom: and of this latter, Man only is capable; of the former, brute Beasts also participate’ (60–1, 64–5).

xvii ‘An example, de facto’ (Prolegomena to Helmont & Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (1649), c2v); ‘Wherefore I come directly to the examination of the Hoti, or matter of Fact.’ (d1r). For examples from the translation, accompanied by the original Latin, see endnote 98.

xviii ‘The Register of Knowledge of Fact is called History. Whereof there be two sorts: one called Naturall History; which is the History of such Facts, or Effects of Nature, as have no Dependance on Mans Will; Such as are the Histories of Metalls, Plants, Animals, Regions, and the like. The other, is Civill History; which is the History of the Voluntary Actions of men in Common-wealths.’ Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), 40.

xix For example, Arnauld & Nicole, Response au P. Annat (1654), Avant-Propos: ‘Or tout le monde demeure d’accord, que les Papes sont point garands de la verité des faits qu’on leur propose, et qu’ils rapportent en suitte dans l’expositif de leurs Rescrits et de leurs Constitutions …’ In Arnauld, Première lettre apologétique de Monsieur Arnauld Docteur de Sorbonne; À un évêque (1656), 12, he denies that the pope and the bishops can determine ‘un point purement de fait, & dont les yeux sont juges’.

xx Pascal, Les Provinciales (1657), 48–9 (4th letter): ‘Ce n’est pas icy un point de foy, ny mesme de raisonnement. C’est une chose de fait. Nous le voyons, nous le sçavons, nous le sentons.’

xxi Contrast Shapin & Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), 24, where ‘Boyle and the experimentalists’ are taken as originating the preoccupation with matters of fact; Hobbes is seen simply as an opponent of arguments from facts (22), not as someone who had originated the language that Boyle uses. It is a strange feature of the book that it takes as its theoretical foundation Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games (15, 22), but never considers the possibility that developing a new language-game might involve changing the meanings of words.

xxii The Marquis of Dorchester was elected to the Royal Society in 1663, although he played no part in its proceedings – one might think that he was rewarded for employing Salusbury as his librarian. Wilding, ‘The Return of Thomas Salusbury’s Life of Galileo (1664)’ (2008), 260.

xxiii Unlike the Aristotelians and the Cartesians, Hobbes had no metaphysical objections to a vacuum, but he could not accept that light could pass through a vacuum, which meant the Torricellian space could not be a vacuum: Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Roberval’ (2002), 187–96, corrects Shapin & Schaffer on this question.

xxiv Above, p. 198.

xxv Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), Vol. 1, 88–107; Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982), 121–3; William Wotton was among the first to stress the importance of the index (Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), 171–2); Wolper, ‘The Rhetoric of Gunpowder’ (1970), 593, thinks this ‘the worst argument’ for the importance of printing. Words fail me. It seems to be the index which drives the introduction of foliation and pagination to supplement the signatures used by printers (pace Blair, ‘Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy’ (2000), 76; see Smith, ‘Printed Foliation’ (1988)): the 1521 translation of Vitruvius, for example, boasts on its title page that it contains a sophisticated index of a new sort, but the index is keyed to folio numbers which are not actually printed in the book and which readers would have been obliged to add by hand.