Sir Francis Bacon was an empiricist, meaning he believed that "all humans were created equally, and thus had the capacity to observe objective truth grounded in nature." Huh? Basically, what that means is that we're all granted the ability to look at what's around us, and thus we can all gather our information (and our root of knowledge) from what we're exposed to. Where as prior rhetoricians such as Plato believed absolute truths were found within a higher power such as a god, Empiricists made the claim that truth is found within science, seeing as we can actually witness it occuring, and are then able to make key observations. 

 

As far as epistemology goes, the empiricists believe that knowledge or absolute truth stems exactly from scientific observation, and the sense data we acquire from what we're exposed to, or our experiences. Any new information that we gather is believed to be discovered inductively, meaning we take specific examples that we believe to be true, and then formulate a larger, or more broad general conclusion with what we've added. This inductive way of thinking eventually lead to the scientific method we're familiar with today. 

 

By compiling our experiences and accounting for our sense data, the empiricists believed that that was representative of objective truth, however when attempting to describe our individually sensed experiences and the knowledge that accompanies them through rhetoric, the truth was distorted. This resulted in the separation between knowledge and language, as they very much so believed that language "could not accurately represent pure and objective knowledge." With this in mind, empiricists sought to purify language and improve the methods of communication in order to formulate truth through language as objectively as possible, creating a universal understanding known as perspicuity.