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’: concepts, theories, and norms appear to undergo deep and radical changes. Nor can one speak of a steady, linear accumulation of knowledge in the direction of or as a gradual approach of 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 may argue that discontinuities have occurred as well. Even more intriguingly, the very distinction between natural sciences and humanities, which we take for granted nowadays, appears to be of surprisingly recent origin.

It was the French philosopher Michel Foucault who, independent of Kuhn, called attention to the discontinuous development of the sciences of man. In his 1966 The Order of Things, Foucault discussed the historical development of knowledge concerning questions that has since the nineteenth century been labelled 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; the latter were focused 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 common currency in the Renaissance. That is, one may 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.