Chapter 2.4: Michel Foucault, epistemes

[Music] michel foucault has had a huge impact on the way we think about science and society he is perhaps best known for his analysis of power which we'll talk about in another lecture but his approach to the history of science and especially his analysis of that history in terms of what he calls epistemic has also been very influential and that's what we will focus on today just like Kuhn Foucault believes that the history of science is not one single smooth trajectory towards more and more knowledge instead there are sudden changes sudden ruptures as we know Kuhn understood these sudden changes in terms of paradigm shifts when the background assumptions of a science are switched for different ones almost overnight fucose idea about the history of science is at the same time very similar and very different it is very similar because just like Kuhn he believes that big ruptures occur when certain background assumptions are changed Foucault calls the some of these assumptions an AP stammered and a casual reader might think that that is just a different word for paradigm but in reality fucose concept of an AP stammer is also very different from Koons concept of a paradigm in order to understand Foucault we need to understand this difference so what is an AP stammer before we answer that question we first need to discuss the way in which Foucault approaches history according to Foucault all of us including historians have a tendency to put way too much emphasis on the subject that is on the individual human being and her beliefs desires decisions and so on for instance if we want to explain why Germany lost the Second World War we tend to favor explanation in terms of decisions made by important leaders like Hitler and Church you Germany lost the war because Hitler suffered from a mental breakdown and started making foolish decisions that's the kind of theory that we can easily comprehend and that we find satisfying but it might not be the best explanation would Germany really have one with a different leader perhaps there were large-scale economic geographical and political facts which basically predetermined that Germany would lose maybe no individual not even Hitler made that much of a difference to the outcome explanations in terms of such impersonal forces can feel abstract and unsatisfying but they might be closer to the truth than explanations in terms of individual subjects now the same thing might be true in a history of science we like to talk about individual geniuses like Newton Darwin Freud or Foucault but perhaps the course of science is not determined by such individuals but by large-scale processes and tendencies in science itself and in society at large perhaps our science would have been pretty much the same if Newton Darwin Freud and Foucault had never lived Foucault would agree with that but he doesn't just want to move away from the individual subject to explanations that are at a larger scale involving groups of individuals he wants to move away entirely from the level of the consciousness of subjects well what is that at the level of our conscious thinking we have certain beliefs and desires and we make decisions based on those historians of science Foucault points out have mostly been interested in these conscious phenomena we want to know why Darwin believed certain things what his arguments for those beliefs were why he decided to publish them when he did what other people there thought about them and so on when we write a history of science we were mostly focused on these conscious aspects but for Foucault that is a problem by focusing on the things that people are conscious of we miss the most important stuff the unconscious rules that determine how we think and write and act let's consider that for a moment if you want to understand why people behave in a certain way it is of course important to know about their conscious beliefs and desires and decisions I am making this film about Foucault because I have decided to do so and I made the decision because I believe Foucault is a very interesting thinker and you should know something about his work if you want to understand why people behave in a certain way it is also important and maybe even more important to look at the unconscious rules that govern our behavior there are all kinds of rules for instance that determine which thoughts we take seriously enough to really consider and which ones we don't before making this film I made a conscious decision about which shirt to wear but I did not make the conscious decision to wear a shirt rather than appear completely naked why well it never occurred to me that I could go here naked and if it had occurred to me I would have dismissed that thought without really considering it why because there is a cultural rule against nakedness that is incorporated so deeply into my mind that it affects me even when I'm not consciously thinking about it according to Foucault something like this is also going on in science in every society and in every period of time there are unconscious rules that determine what kinds of discourse that is what kinds of speech or writing are taken seriously in science the vast majority of the time scientists aren't even aware of these rules but they do termen what is and what is not discussed in any scientific period these rules are what Foucault calls an AP Stannah so an AP stemmer is a set of unconscious rules that govern all serious scientific discourse in a certain society and time period and determine what does and does not get taken seriously by that scientific community here's an example a popular kind of book in the Middle Ages was the best theory an often beautifully illustrated collection of descriptions of animals these descriptions were often coffee pasted from different sources including the Bible ancient authors and more recent reports with almost no critical fact-checking one major aim of many best Theory authors was to draw a moral or religious lesson from every animal because the idea was that the animal kingdom Illustrated God's intentions for mankind these bass theories were taken seriously as sources of wheat what we can anachronistically call scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages but they would not be taken seriously by a modern scientist the rules of the medieval ap stamen allow perhaps even encourage the scientists to copy his knowledge from famous authors and to draw moral lessons from nature the rules of the modern epistemic on the other hand require all knowledge to be based on critically examined observation reports and require a strict distinction between science and moralizing a modern biologist wouldn't even think about drawing a moral lesson from an animal whereas the medieval author sees this as perhaps his most important task wouldn't even think about it that's the phrase that Foucault wants to emphasize the epistemic determines what thoughts we take seriously enough to really think about we can now see the important differences between an epistemic paradigm first a paradigm consists of stuff that a scientist is conscience all theories methods concepts instruments and so on it's the stuff we are working with and at the stem out on the other hand involves rules that are so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we are hardly aware of them biologists don't think about how they are not allowed to draw moral lessons they just don't draw moral lessons second a paradigm is specific to a single scientific discipline there's a paradigm in linguistics in a very different paradigm in art history or maybe there's even a paradigm of historical linguistics and a paradigm of social linguistics and so on but an epistemic is much broader it encompasses all the scientists if biologists are allowed to draw moral lessons from nature and so are ethnographers and physicists and so on third paradigms don't have to be all that long lived during a turbulent period maybe there could be several paradigm shifts in a century within a single scientific discipline epistemic on the other hand change very rarely according to Foucault there have been just three epistemic in European science in the past five hundred years as you can imagine what an epistemic does change the impact on science will be huge in every science at once the very rules that determine which ideas and theories are taken seriously will change Foucault claims that this happened around 1600 and again around 1800 and if we look at something like the medieval bestiaries and compare it to a current textbook on say evolutionary biology we can imagine how huge those changes must have been and who knows maybe another change of a beast a man lies just around the corner you

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Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2017