ALESSANDRO

ZIR

 

NEITHER CONSTRUCTIVISM NOR TRADITIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY:

HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGY (A SUSPICIOUS PAMPHLET FROM THE BRAZILIAN QUARTERS.)*

INTRODUCTION
HISTORICAL METAEPISTEMOLOGY
ARCHEOLOGY
CONCLUDING REMARKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The term historical a priori , as Foucault explains in L'Archéologie du savoir, doesn't designate a condition of validity of judgements or truths that would be impossible to formulate, but exactly the way the enunciations emerge, subsist, coexist with one another, change, and disappear in discursive practices (1969: 166-169). The display of the enunciations is a concrete space in which ideas, sciences, theories, and knowledge struggle for stabilizing themselves. In Les Mots et les Choses , Foucault also call this space positivity and "episteme":

[...] what we want to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which different kinds of knowledge, considered independently of any criterion regarding their rational value or their objective forms, root their positivity and manifest in this manner a history that is not the one of their growing perfection, but, rather, the one of their possibility conditions; in that report, what should appear are, in the space of the knowledge, the configurations that gave place to the several forms of the empiric knowledge. More than a history in the traditional sense of the word, it is an "archeology " (1966: 13).

As Foucault says in L'Archéologie du savoir, the episteme, revealed by the archeological analysis, should not be considered "a kind of rationality that, crossing the most several sciences, would manifest the sovereign unit of a subject, of a spirit or of a time" (1969: 250). The episteme cannot be separated from the problematic set of relationships that one can discover among enunciations in certain speeches. Any reduction of those relationships to a system of postulates or any subjection of them to a subject, empiric or transcendental, can be considered, from the point of view of archeology, a precipitate attitude. We can see then the critical value of these approaches of Foucault and Hacking: they constitute a counterpoint to the reflections and the researches that traditionally are undertaken in Philosophy and also in the called Social Human Sciences.