The purpose of this paper is to assess Bacon’s proclamation of the novelty of his Novum Organum . We argue that in the Novum Organum , Bacon reshapes the traditional representation of logic as providing tools for the building of philosophical discourse. For he refuses both an understanding of logic in terms of an ars disserendi , and an approach to philosophy in terms of a discourse of a certain type of necessity and universality. How can Bacon articulate a logic, that is, a set of rules with formal features, on the basis of a distrust of the paradigm of discourse? This seemingly paradoxical definition of logic follows from Bacon’s rejection of the conception of the scientific reasoning provided by the Organon . It also stems from his reworking of Aristotle’s semiotics, in an effort to deal with the gap between what reality consists in and what the mind perceives of it.