Abstract: In the Novum Organum, Bacon’s repeated claims that reasoning has to be close to “the things themselves” are grounded on a dissmissal of Aristotle’s theory of meaning and reference as it is illustrated in the treatise On Interpretation. So Bacon bases his logic on new semantic groundings. Our contention in this paper is that the shape of this logic is also determined by a systematic reworking of the Aristotelian notion of substance, and of the approach to predication and matter it involves.
