Between Bacon and Descartes: Vico’s Methodology and the Critique of Algorithmic Reductionism

Abstract

This paper examines Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova as an epistemological alternative to the algorithmic rationality underlying artificial intelligence. Grounded in Vico’s verum-factum principle that humans can only truly know what they have created, it argues that data-driven models distort knowledge by detaching it from its historical and creative origins. Through a comparative analysis of Baconian empiricism and Cartesian rationalism, the study demonstrates how Vico synthesises these traditions into a hermeneutic methodology centred on the mondo civile: the human-made world of meanings, laws and institutions. By uniting philologia (the domain of historical particulars) with philosophia (the pursuit of universal truths) within a dynamic interpretive circle, Vico establishes the autonomy of the human sciences against technological reductionism. His concepts of sensus communis (communal understanding) and ingenium (contextual judgment) reveal why algorithms can simulate but not comprehend meaning. The article concludes that Vico’s human-centred framework offers an indispensable foundation for preserving interpretive understanding in the digital age.