The Foucauldian Episteme

Episteme: The set of unconscious rules that govern all serious scientific discourse in a certain society and time period and determine what does and what does not get taken seriously by that scientific community.

Differences between episteme and paradigms:

1) Paradigm is conscious, episteme is unconscious.

2) Paradigm affect a single scientific discipline, episteme affect all of the sciences.

3) Paradigms are shorter lived than episteme.  According to Foucault, there have been just three episteme in European science in the past five hundred years (changes  circa 1600 and 1800).

To change the "episteme", one must change the name/ language/ discourse:

ie - GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, was an early name for the disease that later became known as AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. In early 1981, doctors in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco began reporting strange symptoms in some of their gay male patients, including compromised immune function. The disease was initially called "gay cancer" or "GRID" because it primarily affected gay men. The term "GRID" was first mentioned in The New York Times on May 11, 1981, and contributed to the public perception that AIDS only affected gay men.

Excerpt from video:

Foucault's concept of an episteme is also very different from Kuhn's concept of a paradigm. In order to understand Foucault, we need to understand this difference. So, what is an episteme?

Before we answer that question, we first need to discuss the way in which Foucault approaches history. According to Foucault, all of us, including historians, have a tendency to put way too much emphasis on the subject, that is, on the individual human being and her beliefs, desires, decisions, and so on. For instance, if we want to explain why Germany lost the Second World War, we tend to favor explanation in terms of decisions made by important leaders like Hitler and Churchhill. "Germany lost the war because Hitler suffered from a mental breakdown and started making foolish decisions." That's the kind of theory that we can easily comprehend, and that we find satisfying. But it might not be the best explanation. Would Germany really have won with a different leader? Perhaps there were large-scale economic geographical and political facts which basically predetermined that Germany would lose. Maybe no individual, not even Hitler, made that much of a difference to the outcome. Explanations in terms of such impersonal forces can feel abstract and unsatisfying, but they might be closer to the truth than explanations in terms of individual subjects.

Now the same thing might be true in a history of science. We like to talk about individual geniuses like Newton, Darwin, Freud, or Foucault. But perhaps the course of science is not determined by such individuals, but by large-scale processes and tendencies in science itself, and in society at large. Perhaps our science would have been pretty much the same if Newton, Darwin, Freud, and Foucault had never lived. Foucault would agree with that. But he doesn't just want to move away from the individual subject to explanations that are at a larger scale involving groups of individuals. He wants to move away entirely from the level of the "consciousness of subjects".

Well, what is that? At the level of our conscious thinking, we have certain beliefs and desires and we make decisions based on those. Historians of science, Foucault points out, have mostly been interested in these conscious phenomena. We want to know why Darwin believed certain things, what his arguments for those beliefs were, why he decided to publish them when he did, what other people there thought about them, and so on.

When we write a history of science, we were mostly focused on these conscious aspects. But for Foucault that is a problem. By focusing on the things that people are conscious of, we miss the most important stuff, the unconscious rules that determine how we think and write and act.

Let's consider that for a moment, if you want to understand why people behave in a certain way, it is of course important to know about their conscious beliefs, and desires, and decisions. I am making this film about Foucault because I have decided to do so. And I made the decision because I believe Foucault is a very interesting thinker, and you should know something about his work. if you want to understand why people behave in a certain way it is also important and maybe even more important to look at the unconscious rules that govern our behavior.

 

There are all kinds of rules, for instance, that determine which thoughts we take seriously enough to really consider, and which ones we don't. Before making this film, I made a conscious decision about which shirt to wear, but I did not make the conscious decision to wear a shirt rather than appear completely naked. Why? Well it never occurred to me that I could go here naked, and if it had occurred to me, I would have dismissed that thought without really considering it. Why? Because there is a cultural rule against nakedness that is incorporated so deeply into my mind that it affects me even when I'm not consciously thinking about it.

According to Foucault something like this is also going on in science. In every society, and in every period of time, there are unconscious rules that determine what kinds of discourse, that is, what kinds of speech or writing are taken seriously. In science, the vast majority of the time scientists aren't even aware of these rules, but they determine what is, and what is not discussed. In any scientific period, these rules are what Foucault calls an "episteme".

So, an episteme is a set of unconscious rules that govern all serious scientific discourse in a certain society, and time period, and determine what does and does not get taken seriously by that scientific community. 

Here's an example a popular kind of book in the Middle Ages was the "beastiary". An often beautifully illustrated collection of descriptions of animals, these descriptions were often copy-pasted from different sources, including the Bible, ancient authors, and more recent reports, with almost no critical fact-checking. One major aim of many beastiary authors, was to draw a moral or religious lesson from every animal, because the idea was that the animal kingdom illustrated God's intentions for mankind. These beastiaries were taken seriously as sources of what we can anachronistically call "scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages, but they would not be taken seriously by a modern scientist. The rules of the medieval episteme allow, perhaps even encourage, the scientists to copy his knowledge from famous authors, and to draw moral lessons from Nature. The rules of the modern episteme on the other hand, require all knowledge to be based on critically examined observation reports, and require a strict distinction between science and moralizing. A modern biologist wouldn't even think about drawing a moral lesson from an animal. Whereas the medieval author sees this as perhaps his most important task. 

"Wouldn't even think about it." That's the phrase that Foucault wants to emphasize. The epistemic determines what thoughts we take seriously enough to really think about.