Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michel Foucault's Immature Science
IAN HACKING
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
NOUS 13 (1979) 39
?1 979 by Indiana University
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
40 NOOS
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S IMMATURE SCIENCE 41
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
42 NOUS
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S IMMATURE SCIENCE 43
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
44 NOUS
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S IMMATURE SCIENCE 45
phy, let me say that despite our concern with "reading" and
"texts," Foucault's archaeology is the very opposite of her-
meneutics. To recall an etymology, Hermes is the winged
messenger of the gods, and hermeneutics is the art of inter-
preting what Hermes brought. Hermeneutics tries to find
what meaning lives beneath the sentences that have been
written, if not by God, at least by the past. We are to relive that
past to see what can have been meant. Archaeology is quite the
opposite; it wants not to interpret the texts but to display the
relationships between sentences that explain why just these
were uttered and those were not. "What counts in the things
said by men is not so much what they may have thought or the
extent to which these things represent their thoughts, as that
which systematizes them from the outset." ([5]: xix). Doubtless
the able hermeneuticist will, thanks to his sensibility and learn-
ing, teach us much, but his mode and motivation is entirely
different from that of Quine or Foucault.
To return to American points of reference, Foucault's
sixth hypothesis is like Kuhn's: an expectation of discon-
tinuity. In France this is a commonplace, thanks partly to the
Marxist background but also due to the historiography of
science. The work which Koyre did in the 1930's is Kuhn's
acknowledged predecessor: it aimed at showing, contra
Duhem, that Galileo effected a radical break with the past. In
the 20's Gaston Bachelard had already begun to elaborate a
theory of "epistemological blocks" and ensuing "ruptures".3
Bachelard has, in recent years, been far more widely read than
Koyre while, in a more scholarly way, Georges Canguilhem
has systematically elaborated the details of scientific revolu-
tions over the whole panoply of science. So Kuhn was a sensa-
tion for us, but rather old hat in France.
When we turn from a belief in revolutions to an attempt
to analyze their structure there is little agreement between
Kuhn and Foucault, but possibly this is because Kuhn is less
concerned with immature science. Kuhn's revolutions start
with crises (that are by no means easy to document) and
proceed through climax to an achievement. They are fol-
lowed by normal science in which certain exemplars are
codified in textbooks and used as the norms of successful
research. Moreover by showing how to solve particular prob-
lems they serve as the bridge between abstract theory and
practical technique. This is an eminently accurate description
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
46 NOUS
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S IMMATURE SCIENCE 47
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
48 NOUS
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S IMMATURE SCIENCE 49
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
50 NOUS
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S IMMATURE SCIENCE 51
REFERENCES
[1] Gaston Bachelard, Essaie sur la connaissance approaches,, (Paris: Vrin, 1928).
[2] , Le Materialisme rationnel, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953).
[3] Georges Canguilhem, "Mort de ihomme ou epuissement du Cogito?" Critique
(1967): 600-18.
[4] Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les hoses, (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated as The
Order of Things, (London: Tavistock, 1970).
[5] , The Birth of the Clinic, (London: Tavistock, 1973): 199.
[6] , "Archaeology of the Human Science; A Scetch of a History," forthcom-
ing.
[7] Ian Hacking, Review of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Cambridge Review (1972).
[8] ' The Emergence of Probability, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975): Chaps. 2-6.
[9] T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1962).
[10] Paracelsus, Simmtliche Werke, Vol. 12, (Munich: 0. W. Barth, 1922).
[11] Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978).
NOTES
This content downloaded from 217.113.246.225 on Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:35:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms