The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole

Abstract

During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole's term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. Recovering the prehistory of the term suggests that "serendipity," rather than being a name for a special mode of discovery invented by Walpole, has all along accompanied empiricism as the name for an essential gap in its epistemology. Serendipity bears directly on the "induction problem," or what has more recently been called the "conceptual leap." Though Walpole gave it its current name, versions of the concept have all along isolated a critical gap in the method of the sciences inaugurated by Bacon.

Rethinking expeditions: On critical expeditionary practice

“…This tension between structuration and event, between control and creativity, also highlights serendipity’s active critical potential, posing, in Lorrain Daston’s (2004: 30) terms, an ‘uncomfortable conundrum’ to empiricist methodologies that venerated intent, predictability and the deliberate mind of the scientific discoverer. Rather than submit to the confines of the planned and the predictable, serendipity heightens our attention to ‘the way concepts emerge from the unexpected bumps and nudges of the material world’ (Silver, 2015: 236).…”

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“…In addition to following a well-structured, pre-planned and formal research approach, scientists occasionally discover important and unique phenomena by chance, error, or accident which is referred to as serendipity (Merton, 1948; McCay-Peet and Toms, 2015). The term serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole[3] in 1754 based on the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip” who made unexpected discoveries by accidents and sagacity while travelling (Foster and Ellis, 2014; Silver, 2015). Many important discoveries, such as anesthesia (Holmes, 2009), penicillin (Bennett and Chung, 2001), x-rays (Glasser, 1995), the universal law of gravitation (Miller, 1951) and Viagra (Osterloh, 2004), were serendipitous in nature.…”

“…3. It is possible that Horace Walpole relied on the works of Francis Bacon when coining the term serendipity (Silver, 2015). …”

Serendipity in oto-rhino-laryngology

“…Walpole derived the word “serendipity” from the title of a French version of the sixteenth-century Italian version of the old Persian fairy tale of Amir Khusrau (1302) about ‘The peregrination of the three Princes of Serendip’. “As their Highnesses travelled,” Walpole remarks, “they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of” ([ 5 ], p. 238). Walpole’s letter was virtually forgotten but revitalized by the polymath and sociologist of science Robert K. Merton, who came across the term in the Oxford English Dictionary [ 6 ].…”

“…And while he was pursuing game, he accidentally found Ceres. Bacon concludes that it was Pan’s sagacious experience and general knowledge of nature that enabled the discovery of Ceres “whilst the pursuit was directed another way” ([ 5 ], p. 243).…”