Michel Foucault's Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Kuhn limited himself to the development of the natural sciences; he hesitated to use the concept of paradigm for the social sciences and the humanities. However, if one studies the different views concerning the various aspects of human life that have been formulated over the centuries, one may hit upon a phenomenon we have also encountered in Kuhn. Here, too, one can find the kind of discontinuous developments that Kuhn called ‘scientific revolutions’ whereby concepts, theories, and norms undergo deep and radical changes. Nor can one speak of a steady, linear accumulation of knowledge in the direction of, or a gradual approach towards, the ‘truth’. In other words, in the development of knowledge concerning man – that is, the broad field of the social and human sciences, and more specifically the humanities or Geisteswissenschaften – one could argue that discontinuities have occurred as well. Even more intriguingly, the very distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities, which we take for granted nowadays, appears to be of surprisingly recent origin.

It was the French philosopher Michel Foucault who, independently from Kuhn, called attention to the discontinuous development of the sciences of man. In Les mots et les choses (1966, translated as The Order of Things (1971)), Foucault discussed the historical development of knowledge concerning questions that since the nineteenth century have been the concern of economics, biology, and linguistics. The ‘things’ these modern disciplines concern themselves with can be bundled together as labour, life, and language, respectively. These notions, however, could not be expressed in the theories that had been formulated between roughly 1600 and 1800, when the focus was on the analysis of wealth, natural history, and general grammar, respectively. The ideas from this ‘classical’ period, in turn, could not be formulated in the terms that were available during the Renaissance. One may thus observe two radical ruptures. According to Foucault, these ruptures were not primarily the consequence of the discovery of novel objects or phenomena about which new hypotheses might be formulated. Rather, they occurred as mutations in what he calls the ‘deep structure’ of knowledge. Before 1800, he claimed, it was impossible to formulate hypotheses concerning labour, life, or language as distinct entities or objects of knowledge for the simple reason that there was no room for them in the available conceptual frames.