The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

A posteriori (Latin for “from the later”) is a phrase used to distinguish certain categories of knowledge. The phrase works in tandem with a priori, and philosophers group all forms of knowledge under one category or the other. A posteriori knowledge is knowledge derived from empirical evidence and observations of/interactions with the world. The phrase “some apples are red” is a posteriori knowledge because it requires us to see red apples and not-red apples out in the world. The “later” of a posteriori refers to knowledge that comes after the fact of encountering an object or thing within the world outside of our own minds.

A priori (Latin for “from the earlier”) is a phrase used to distinguish certain categories of knowledge. It is the sibling term to a posteriori. A priori knowledge is built on mathematical reasoning and deductive logic to prove what is true. The phrase “two plus two equals four” is a priori knowledge because it relies on the principles and definitions of mathematics. We do not need to see two groups of two things adding up to four things in the world to know it is true. The “earlier” of a priori refers to knowledge that comes from the mind before we encounter the world.

Foucault uses a priori to indicate the historical basis for the “sciences of man” (413). The historical advent of the “sciences of man” is a priori because Foucault posits history as a given for the existence of humans. This is similar to how we might know mathematical truths from pure reason and then ensure through empirical evidence that two plus two does indeed equal four. A priori knowledge often leads to a posteriori knowledge.

Archaeology is the excavation of human remains and the traces of human activity to learn about past cultures and peoples. Foucault borrows the term for his methodology in The Order of Things, which he calls “an archaeology of knowledge” (236).

Foucault uses this term because he is examining the history of ideas and “excavating” the sediment and changes in thought that have made certain epistemes possible. Foucault is not concerned with the truth or validity of the Classical or 19th-century epistemes. He is concerned solely with mapping out and exploring the shifts in conceptions of knowledge that made these ways of thinking possible for past people that have led to where we are today. Where an archaeologist excavates physical artifacts from the ground, Foucault uses the term to frame his investigation as a metaphorical excavation of Western ways of thinking.

Catachresis (from the Greek word for “abuse”) is an umbrella term for figures of speech that misuse words or commit a semantic error. Often times, many of these errors are intentional, such as referring to the portion of glasses that sit on our ears as “arms.”

Foucault believes catachresis is one of the “three great figures of rhetoric” (122), alongside synecdoche and metonymy. Foucault posits that these three figures of language are necessary for the evolution and increasing complexity of languages. The consequence of this claim is that error in attribution and syntax is a necessary part of the evolution in a language. Catachresis is an important tool in semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols.

In Foucault’s work, the Classical Age encompasses the 17th and 18th centuries. This coincides with the European Enlightenment, the invention of natural history and taxonomy, general grammar, and the analysis of wealth. While Foucault refers to this period as the “Classical Age,” most scholars refer to this period as the Enlightenment.

All of Foucault’s scholarship concerns the Classical Age. Since Foucault views history as a gradual shift in epistemes from era to era, Foucault identifies the Classical Age as a direct predecessor to modern thought, sciences, and ways of navigating the world. For this reason, all of his scholarship involves tracing the history of a concept or idea (which, in The Order of Things, is the concept of knowledge itself) from the Classical Age up to the modern day.

Cogito (Latin for “I think”) is a term popularized by Descartes in his statement of “I think, therefore I am.” Foucault uses the phrase “the cogito” to refer to the thinking subject. For Foucault, the cogito is an episteme’s functional conception of a thinking subject: How does the thinking subject know and think? How can they reflect on themselves and the world? The cogito is the answer to these questions, which means that the specifics of the cogito vary from episteme to episteme.

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that roots knowledge in experience of the world through the senses. “Empiricism” enters English through the Greek and Latin words for “experience.” Empirical knowledge is the basis for the scientific method and was first developed by the natural historians to taxonomize species of plants and animals. Many of the Classical Age thinkers that Foucault cites—including John Locke, David Hume, and Francis Bacon—established empiricism as a foundation for knowledge.

A key concern for Foucault is the turning of empiricism onto humanity in the 19th century. Since empiricism is entirely reliant on human experience of the world, taking the subject that practices empiricism as the object to be studied by empiricism in the 19th century contributed directly to the episteme shift.

An episteme is a series of intellectual structures that determines what a culture can know is true, what counts as valid knowledge, and how one can talk about knowledge. For example, we no longer accept oracles and divination as valid producers of knowledge. Any study that is not peer-reviewed is suspect and likely conducted poorly. These are part of our 21st-century Western episteme. “Episteme” comes from the Greek word for knowledge. The confines of the episteme serve as the definitions, principles, etc. that people living within an episteme might use to understand the world around them.

The episteme changes over time and makes understandings about knowledge shift accordingly in a culture. As an “archaeologist” of knowledge, Foucault is not concerned with whether or not the Classical episteme is more or less correct than the 19th-century episteme. What interests him is the shift between the two and how one can turn into the other over time. The episteme is an abstract representation of what we can imagine as possible or true.

When Foucault ponders the death of the concept of “man” in the final chapter, he is gesturing towards inevitable shifts in the episteme (422). Foucault’s framework of the episteme means that people in the future will necessarily think about knowledge in fundamentally different ways than us and will have a hard time understanding our episteme, in the same way that Foucault posits the Classical episteme as a concept difficult for us to grasp.

Epistemology is the area of philosophy that studies knowledge and the production of knowledge. “Epistemology” and “episteme” derive from the same Greek word for “knowledge.” Concepts like a priori and a posteriori knowledge are examples of some of the ideas that preoccupy epistemologists. René Descartes is a famous example of a philosopher concerned with epistemology.

Foucault often uses “epistemological” as an adjective to describe the frameworks and inquiries into knowledge production (how we know what we know) that he discusses. When Foucault talks about “epistemological configurations” or “epistemological networks,” he is discussing the small structures that make knowledge in certain fields or ways of knowing possible. Foucault talks about the “epistemological configuration” of 19th-century science as one small facet of the much larger 19th-century episteme (398).

Hermeneutics is the theory of comprehension, communication, and interpretation. There are different kinds of hermeneutics that provide different interpretative rules for understanding texts and communications in general. Hermeneutics are then applied to objects of study (mostly written works) to produce critical analysis. Hermeneutics was vital to the 16th-century episteme, which Foucault explores in Chapter 2.

Until about the 15th century, the Bible was the center of most hermeneutical pursuits in Europe. Hermeneutics is the result of critical textual analysis moving outside of the realm of religion to the philosophy and plays of the Greeks, which were popular in the 16th century. For Foucault, hermeneutics was one half of knowledge production in the 16th century. The other half is semiology. The primacy of hermeneutics formed the core of knowledge because hermeneutics seeks to explain texts through resemblance between figures, analogy, and so forth.

An ideology is a set of beliefs or ideas that structure the way one perceives the world. An ideology often does not consider empirical elements as more important than theoretical elements in its configuration.

Foucault defines Ideology (capitalized) as a “foundation underlying all knowledge” (93) that makes interpretation of the world possible. This “foundation” is the subject of continual discourse and the knowledge production that discourse makes possible. Ideology differs from episteme in that an episteme can contain many ideologies at once. For Foucault, ideologies that form within the same episteme cannot be radically different, since they share the same episteme as their condition of existence. This means that Foucault considers Karl Marx not to be a radical thinker writing against capitalism, but a necessary result of the episteme itself.

A locus is a specific point in space where something occurs. For example, a four-way intersection is a locus of traffic. Locus (and its plural, loci) are often used by thinkers like Foucault to give a sense of physical space to the very abstract ideas they discuss. The spatial metaphor concretizes the terms Foucault uses and makes them somewhat less abstract by giving them spatial relations to one another.

Metonymy is an umbrella term for figures of speech that refer to a concept or thing by way of something that is associated heavily with said concept or thing. An example of metonymy is describing something as a “question mark.” Question marks are heavily associated with unknown things and lack of knowledge, so describing something as a question mark means it is a mystery to the speaker.

Foucault believes metonymy is one of the “three great figures of rhetoric” (122), alongside catachresis and synecdoche. Foucault posits that these three figures of language are necessary for the evolution and increasing complexity of languages. Metonymy’s importance to language means that communication through heavy association and resemblance is vital. Resemblance remains a core part of language despite the 19th-century episteme’s distrust of resemblance. This is part of the “return of language” Foucault explores in Chapter 9. Metonymy is also an important tool in semiotics.

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of how we experience our experiences and understand our own consciousness. Phenomenology was founded as a philosophical school by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. Phenomenologists seek to establish conditions, language, and concepts to objectively study the subjective. Phenomenology aims for a repertoire of tools to codify these subjective experiences for philosophical examination and inquiry. Conscious experience and self-descriptions of said experience take the place of traditional data for phenomenology.

For Foucault, phenomenology is the meeting place for transcendental and empirical fields of knowledge within the modern age. Husserl, born in 1859, bridges the gap between the 19th and 20th centuries for Foucault’s exploration of the human sciences.

Positivism is the philosophical branch of empiricism. Positivism rejects all knowledge that is not a posteriori or self-evidently true. The creation of positivism is usually attributed to Auguste Comte, whom Foucault cites frequently in The Order of Things. Anything that cannot be proven via a posteriori knowledge or be shown as self-evident is treated as useless to the positivist.

Foucault relies heavily on positivism to gesture to empirical knowledge in The Order of Things. When he uses “positive figures of knowledge” and similar phrases, Foucault is referring to empirical knowledge.

Semiotics is the study of sign systems and how signs make meaning possible. A sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself. The words that make up this guide are all signs that you interpret through your knowledge of written English to make meaning. Semiotics is concerned with the granular relationship between the signified and the signifier and how those relationships might change over time.

Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, founded semiology as a social science in the late 19th/early 20th century. This revival of the study of semiotics was bound up in the “human sciences” that is the object of Foucault’s study in The Order of Things. Saussure borrowed heavily from other human sciences, particularly linguistics and literary analysis, and created scientific approaches to signs and meaning-making.

Since Foucault is concerned with cultures built on writing, from the Renaissance episteme to the modern-day episteme, semiotics are vital to The Order of Things. The three key concepts in semiotics that concern Foucault are the sign, the signified, and the signifier.

The signified is the content that the sign is expressing. For example, the actual apples that exist in the world are the signified when we read the signifier “apple.”

For Foucault, what is signified is just as important as the signifier. What can be considered a proper object or piece of knowledge to be attached to a signifier is always shifting between epistemes.

The signifier is the expression of the content that is being signified. For example, the word “apple” is a signifier that conjures ideas of apples. Actual apples themselves are also signifiers because they bring to mind all of the traits we associate with apples. Things that are signifiers in one instance can become signified in another.

Words as signifiers are understood in the Classical episteme as having a taxonomy related to the history of everything else. In the 19th- and 20th-century epistemes, philologists like Saussure begin to examine the internal mechanisms and history that shape words as signifiers.

Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used as a stand-in for the whole. For example, referring to a monarch by saying “the crown.” Foucault believes synecdoche is one of the “three great figures of rhetoric” (122) alongside catachresis and metonymy. Foucault posits that these three figures of language are necessary for the evolution and increasing complexity of languages. Synecdoche’s importance to language shows that there is always a continual chain of association within language. The crown stands for the king, the king stands for the country, and so forth.

Synecdoche carries meaning-making through chains of association that precipitate the “return of language” in Chapter 9. Foucault conceptualizes language as both the source of all knowledge and a phenomenon that relies on slippery meanings due to figures of speech like synecdoche.

A taxonomy is a method for classifying a group of things. These methods often seek to encompass and sort everything within a particular group of things. For example, the natural historians of the Classical Age taxonomized plants by their visual appearances and visual features, while the general grammarians sought to categorize the different functions of language as they pertained to discourse (i.e. the discussion of ideas and seeking truth on a subject). Classical taxonomy relies heavily on observation instead of experimentation and the proving of hypotheses like modern science.

Foucault argues that taxonomy is the vital essence of the Classical episteme because its tables (or tabulations) order everything in a continuous chain of association and continuity from one object to the next within a group of things. Foucault sometimes uses the Latin taxinomia to refer to the system of thought that encompasses taxonomy.