The Thoughts Of Francis Bacon In The SFL Community

Russell (1961: 527, 528):

Bacon's most important book, The Advancement of Learning, is in many ways remarkably modern.  He is commonly regarded as the originator of the saying 'Knowledge is power', and though he may have had predecessors who said the same thing, he said it with new emphasis.  The whole basis of his philosophy was practical: to give mankind mastery over the forces of nature by means of scientific discoveries and inventions.

… he objected to any admixture of teleological explanation in the actual investigation of phenomena; everything, he held, should be explained as following necessarily from efficient causes. 

Blogger Comment:

The 'genre pedagogy' wing of the SFL community has twice used the slogan Language is social power, so its concern is not so much with 'mastery over the forces of nature' as with 'mastery over each other'.  However, in contradistinction to Bacon, the theory which informs genre pedagogy takes a teleological perspective on text function.