Everyone has prejudices. How innocent are prejudices? I have prejudices as a reviewer of Agassi's book. So what? I have a prejudice in favour of Agassi's very use of intellectual history. However, I have a prejudice against taking inductivism as seriously as Agassi takes inductivism. Agassi intensively discusses Bacon's inductivism in terms of the following: ‘the riddle of Bacon’, or what made Bacon such an important thinker for early modern science, even though there was apparently no or very little originality in Bacon's inductivist methodology. Agassi also discusses the various early and later critics of Bacon. Could my prejudice against inductivism focus my attention as a reviewer away from Agassi's serious discussion of the importance historically of inductivism, as opposed to focusing my attention on Agassi's own critical remarks about inductivism? Inductivism is ‘a myth, a post hoc justification of some belief in some theory and a post hoc condemnation of some refuted view and of those who ever believed it’ (p. 296). In short, do my prejudices lead me to underplay, as a reviewer, how Agassi highlights the historical importance of Baconian inductivism and Boyle's version of Baconian inductivism for the development of the idea of science and the institutions that embedded the idea of science in its early days? (See sections 10.1 and 14.7.)

Do my concerns about prejudice rest on a tacit Baconian theory of prejudice? (See Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7 and 16.) More generally, is the Baconian idea of prejudice institutionally embedded? For instance, moral and judicial fairness requires judges to remove themselves from duty in cases where relatives, friends or financial backers are involved in order to avoid prejudicial judgments. Is this approach to prejudice in our legal institutions different from the approach to prejudice in our intellectual institutions? Agassi sees an overlap between the two approaches to prejudice – in our legal and intellectual institutions – in so far as we implicitly adopt a Baconian attitude that prejudice is always bad and can be totally avoided. (See section 7.2, as well as the formative Biblical source text quoted by Agassi in his own translation, Deuteronomy 16:19: ‘You shall not take a bribe, for the bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the word of the righteous’.)

Can we take it for granted that prejudice is always cognitively bad? (Or is our prejudice about prejudice always cognitively bad? See, again, section 7.2.) Agassi's main point in his intellectual history of the very idea of science is that Bacon's great contribution is his discovery of the very question of prejudice. (See Chapters 8 and 9.) According to Bacon, we can only have science when we eliminate prejudice. According to Bacon, we can only eliminate prejudice through adopting the methodology of inductivism. Thus science, according to Bacon, equals the methodology of inductivism. Bacon had the vision. He was the architect. However, Boyle was the constructor who implemented Bacon's blueprint. To make a reality of Bacon's vision, Boyle modified Baconian inductivism. Boyle, according to Agassi, ended up rejecting Bacon's ‘doctrine of prejudice’ – at least the idea that inductivism can completely avoid prejudice. (See Chapter 10, and in particular section 10.3.) In Boyle's version and implementation of the inductive methodology, induction can at best put controls on unavoidable prejudice.

Agassi's main message for current practitioners of the philosophy and history of science is that Bacon's and Boyle's theories of prejudice have had an effect on two fundamental questions from the early days of the philosophy and history of science until today. First is the question raised by the so-called Duhem–Quine thesis of the theory-embedded nature of observation – if observation is ‘theory-laden’, can hypotheses be refuted by observations? (See section 6.2.) Second is the question raised by Kuhn's theory of the domination of science by paradigms – if paradigms amount to intellectual prisons of prejudice in science, how can there be any earth-shattering discoveries in science? (See sections 6.4 and 6.5.) Both questions, we learn from Agassi's book, hark back to the early intellectual history of the idea of science.

One of the major tasks of Agassi's book, apart from looking at the intellectual development of the very idea of science – is to look at the social context and social consequences of the very idea of science as the implementation of Bacon's and Boyle's versions of inductivism. (See Chapters 11, 12 and 13.) An issue of keen interest to some of today's philosophers and historians of science is the role of intellectual elites and power elites in science. Agassi points out that elitism in science is historically later in development – both in theory and in practice. (See especially section 14.7.) Most of the early scientists were amateurs and were expected to be amateurs and dilettantes: pursuers of science for its own sake and enjoyment. Morever, inductivism was intended to be a mechanical process for everyone's use that would lead to the discovery and collection of general facts, many novel. (See section 2.4.)

To sum up: the main contribution of Agassi's book, to my mind, is twofold. The first contribution is Agassi's extensive discussion of the intellectual history of the idea of prejudice – Bacon's novel idea that prejudice can only be avoided by using the methodology of inductivism in science – and Boyle's modified Baconianism that the methodology of inductivism is only generally reliable but not foolproof against prejudice. (See Chapter 14.) The second contribution is Agassi's discussion of the novelty of Bacon's vision of an egalitarian republic of science and Boyle's key role in the creation and implementation of that vision in the form of a club for amateur scientists known as the Royal Society. Science today, as Agassi remarks, has evolved into something far from the egalitarian vision of Bacon. Science has evolved into a new authoritarian professionalism: ‘The new authority of science must be checked and new needs taken care of’ (p. 223).