Michel Foucault's Immature Science

Abstract

Most philosophers who write about systematic knowledge have come to restrict themselves to what they call science, although they display a certain uneasiness. Thus Putnam says, physics surely counts as a 'mature science' if any does. ([1 1]: 2 1.) What, we wonder, if nothing counts as mature? suspect that the distinction between mature and immature is, although not ill founded, at least ill understood. Putnam needs it because he wants the more established sciences to be about something, to refer. He sensibly thinks that most early speculation got things wrong. Similarly, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn's many-faceted word paradigm almost implied maturity, because an individual or group achievement (one sense of the term paradigm) had to set the standards to which a normal science would conform. He owned that he could not tell whether sociology, economics, or psychology had paradigms. Likewise Putnam counts some and perhaps all of these among the immature sciences. Neither Putnam nor Kuhn has much to tell us about immaturity. Alongside Putnam's and Kuhn's analyses of systematic knowledge we have a quite different enterprise: epistemology. It is, roughly speaking, Erkenntnistheorie as opposed to Wissenschaftslehre. It is a theory of the facts and events with which we are acquainted, the theory of sense perception, belief, grounds for belief, and the analysis of I know that p. An ethnographer studying American philosophers would have to suppose that the electron and Jones' Ford are almost the only objects of knowledge hereabouts. Today shall consider whether there may be anything of a theoretical sort to say about the vast domain of speculative and common knowledge that falls between electrons and furniture. Our doctors treat us, our bankers house us, our