> >Could you give examples of each?
<...>
> a radically relativistic epistemology. Such forms of radical
> relativism are in the end self-refuting. His book *The
<...>
> the 19th centuries, replicates IMO some of the
> strengths and weaknesses that can be found
> in Thomas Kuhn's *The Structure of Scientific
> Revolutions*. Just as Kuhn saw science as
> evolving by means of paradigmatic revolutions,
> Foucault posited that human knowledge similarly
<...>
> the prevailing episteme. Certainly there is much to
> be said for Foucault's thesis, on the other hand
> he pushes the idea that there was such a radical
> difference between the Classical episteme and
> the modern episteme that recalls Kuhn's contention
> that different paradigms are incommensurable.
> Foucault seems to be saying something similar when
> he argued that general grammar was quite a distinct
> discipline from philology or natural history from
> biology. But this like Kuhn's thesis of the incommensurability
<...>
this reminds me quite a bit of sahlins's critique of foucault, which-- i quote from memory, but i'm not tinkering--casts him as hobbesian and says that 'they were both bald, except for one of them.'
the truth, if there is one, isn't a chi-chi international gourmet shop where one walks down the aisles and picks and chooses this german then compares his weight and price with an 'equivalent' german or frenchman. this 'method' is the kind of sausage produced in academia, where a two- step prevails: a fanatical insistence on historical determination read as 'limitations' rules until we suddenly do the star-trekky hyperspace zoom into a world of theory, where suddenly everything works different and the pursuit of truth is just that, circumstances be damned.
thus we find that foucault's big failing was his (tsk tsk) reliance on nietzsche, whereas kuhn--who we invoke as a sort of dead buddy needing to be hauled off the battlefield--needs no origins at all because he's a rhetorical foil.
the foucault you summarize doesn't sound much like any foucault i ever read, which is a lot; rather, it does sound quite a bit like a cliff's notes premasticated and precritiqued version. for a proponent of radic- ally relativistic epistemology, he sure as hell didn't spend much time theorizing the liminal regions between epistemes. *au contraire*: most of his work was devoted to--and he was savagely criticized for it--the ABSOLUTE and INTEGRAL logic of the epistemes he wrote about.
cheers, t