Foucault’s Precursor: Kuhn?

Dig into the PEL archives and you will find a link to a paper by Hubert Dreyfus on Foucault and Heidegger in which he writes that in Foucault’s early work “the subject is reduced to a function of discourse.” Dreyfus is illustrating an important link between these two towering figures - the role of language, which Heidegger called “the house of being.” 

Language, in fact, plays such an important role in Foucault’s epistemology that his notion of the “episteme,” which as we will see bears a resemblance to Kuhn’s “paradigm,” is grounded in such linguistic objects as discourse, statement, and archive. These are just a few of the technical terms Foucault explores in The Archeology of Knowledge, a book he wrote in response to readers of The Order of Things who likened his approach to structuralism. (The conclusion of Archeology consists of an imaginary dialogue written by Foucault between himself and these very critics.)

If Foucault felt this characterization was inadequate, one can only wonder what he thought of Jean Piaget’s likening of the episteme with Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. Both are ways of describing the fact that every period has its own conditions for what is true, what is nonsense, and how best to ask the most meaningful questions. Most importantly, both abandon what Mark in the podcast calls the “pre-philosophical” view of science as “teleological.”

Now, the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) predates The Order of Things by four years, though chances are Kuhn was no influence on Foucault or vice versa. (This abstract of a paper on narrative genres insightfully compares the two models.)

My own experience with these thinkers is as a teacher of a high school course on the history of ideas. I try to spend at least one class on the panopticon and Foucault's theories of discipline, which resonate with teenagers for all the reasons you might expect if you’ve ever talked to a teenager. However, though talking about Foucault and the redistribution of power is an easy way to grab attention, when we begin new chapters, turning from, say, the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, we talk about “paradigm” shifts—not episteme shifts. I suspect this has more to do with their respective styles and less to do with the actual content of their major contributions. Whatever the reason for "paradigm" becoming mainstream and "episteme" remaining a specialist term, both are better than "zeitgeist."

David Crohn