By the title of this article it would be reasonable for many to assume that they are about to read some strange writing on Semiotics and its relation to a thin slice of fried pork.

Since Semiotics is basically the study of how we receive information through our senses, after typing that title, I myself began to think about how to interpret crispy strips of bacon as a form of communication. I thought about the smell of bacon frying in a pan and the signals it would send to my brain. I then imagined strips of bacon laid out to form letters like some new wrinkled font (i.e., Alice read the bacon: Eat me it said). Finally I had a mental picture of a man standing on a hill sending semaphore signals, but instead of flags he was waving strips of bacon. This caused me some concern and I stopped that train of thought altogether.

Another guess might be that Bacon in the title refers to Kevin Bacon (an American actor) and that this article is about the game called Makin' Bacon . (… also called Six Degrees of Separation , or Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon ). To play the game, one participant names a famous actor or actress. The other players must then try to make a connection to Kevin Bacon by listing movies and their co-stars (i.e., Sean Connery- Sean Connery was in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner, Kevin Costner was in JFK with Kevin Bacon … there it is: Makin' Bacon in only two moves!). Actually it would be reasonable to assume that this article might be about Makin' Bacon since the game itself is based on a form of semiosis. Semiosis is a concept of Semiotics that explains how we get from one idea to another through association. An example of this would be the process that my mind went through when I was thinking about bacon (the food) as a form of communication (e.g., smell of bacon: bacon arranged to form letters: Eat me: Alice in Wonderland, etc.).

A third interpretation of this article's title might be that this article will deal with the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and will somehow relate them to the study of Semiotics, even though there is a gulf of several centuries between the death of the English scholar and the birth of this relatively new field of study.

The truth is actually found somewhere in between. This article does focus on some of the writings of Francis Bacon, but it is also concerned with how someone might arrive at either of the first two conclusions (or any others) instead of the one that I originally intended. Come to think of it, after so many associations with the word bacon I may no longer be certain what I intended the title to mean.

For those that are unfamiliar with Francis Bacon (1561-1626); he was a thinker, a writer, and he has been called the father of deductive reasoning. He entered Trinity College Cambridge at the age of 12 and was in the House of Commons by the age of 23. There has also been a good deal of mystery surrounding the man. Many believe that he was actually the author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare and that those and other of his writings contain encrypted messages.

To the disappointment of some, we will leave the subject of hidden messages for another time and concentrate on a less obscured bit of his writing entitled Novum Organum .

The main point that Bacon makes in Novum Organum is that man's understanding of the world around him is flawed. He attributes the cause of our flawed perception to four concepts that he refers to as Idols . They are:

• Idols of the Tribe based on our sense organs and the peculiar nature of our species, including our “spirit”
• Idols of the Cave a reference to Plato's cave, based on our predisposition as individuals
• Idols of the Market Place based on our conversations with others
• Idols of the Theater based on dogmas, systems, and philosophies handed to us by our culture

To read an English translation from Latin of Bacon's own words, click here or see the footnotes.

After reading these paraphrased definitions of Bacon's Idols, it is not such a far reach to apply them to the study of how man interprets communication.

on to the Semiotics of Bacon part II