“The horizon of archaeology, therefore, is not a science, a rationality, a mentality, a culture; it is a tangle whose limits and points of intersection cannot be fixed in a single operation.” – Michel Foucault
For Michel Foucault (mee-shell foo-koh), paradigms must pass through certain thresholds to become established, and it is this that dovetails with Kuhn’s (koon) theme of scientific revolution. The first threshold is crossed whenever someone speaks of a topic in a manner impossible under the old paradigm, as with Darwin at the dawn of biology. The second threshold marks when the paradigm establishes ways to systematically arrange or rearrange its claims – crossing this threshold makes what was previously just a way of speaking into a knowledge practice, the ‘knowledge’ here being the internal knowledge of these practices (which may later be deemed utterly wrong). There is an element of domination involved in this transition; a way of thinking about a given topic becomes bound by new regularities, and certain kinds of statements become excluded in the process.
Foucault’s third threshold is scientificity, and crossing it establishes a scientific practice. Such paradigms have even greater systematic structure, since its practitioners have formulated the rules by which statements in the given field are constructed. To move from a knowledge practice to a scientific practice requires laws that govern it. Such laws need not be “the language of nature” – they could be completely specious and arbitrary provided they serve the role of governing claims firmly. Natural History was a scientific practice, in Foucault’s terms, because its methods were clearly law‑governed. That our understanding of life changed our understanding of its claims after biology had formed a new practice does not mean Natural History was not also a scientific practice (a view that resonates with Kuhn’s approach).
Lastly, Foucault describes the threshold of formal practices, when a paradigm can state its own principles and axioms. Mathematics is the key example, and Foucault noted that for mathematics the four thresholds were crossed all at once: the moment there was a paradigm that could make statements about relationships between numbers, it also became a formal practice. There is no pattern to the ways paradigms may pass through these four thresholds – and nothing says that any given knowledge practice can cross the threshold into scientific or formal practice. The presumed march of the sciences towards ever greater truth‑giving gravely distorts their history.
In the case of Natural History and biology, Foucault stated that the former had crossed the threshold of the scientific. When biology crossed the threshold of positivity and became a new way of speaking about life, it simultaneously crossed the thresholds of knowledge and scientificity. Other fields have crossed each threshold at different times, sometimes with a century or more between stages, and Foucault cautioned against thinking of these thresholds as necessary developments, like the life cycle of a butterfly.
Crucially, whether or not a knowledge practice ‘brands’ itself as a science has no bearing on whether it will be able to cross into law‑governed scientific practice! I concur with Foucault’s scepticism that economics and psychology are capable of becoming scientific or formal practices in his terms. Psychology is not law‑bound in anything like the ways of Natural History or biology. Its methods are largely limited to the statistical. The situation is worse in spin‑off fields like parapsychology and evolutionary psychology, whose internal knowledge either struggles to describe its own findings or lacks plausible methods of verification.
In Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, just as with Kuhn’s history of science, the lesson is not that the sciences lack methods for uncovering the workings of the material world. It is that the sciences are not evolving towards perfection or ever greater truth. Some fields, like optics, will cross the threshold of formalization and become robust systems of knowledge. Others might never cross into law‑governed scientific practices at all.
The mythology of science as a single ever‑perfecting system distorts both the complexity of scientific methods and the achievements of scientists in making objects ‘talk’. Besides, from everything learned about biological evolution, it would be naïve to think of anything evolving towards something, since the accumulation of advantages is always the result of adaptation to prevailing conditions. So it is with the sciences. Each is unique, with its own strengths, limitations, regularities, and constraints shaped by prevailing conditions of knowledge. What will become of them is not something anyone can truly know.
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