What is actually real, and how would we find out?
His own student keeps the word form and moves it out of that other realm.
What makes things move, and where do they come from?
His cosmos then holds for two thousand years, so the next break is a large one.
Why did Western Europe build the technology it built?
Now the Greek picture starts to come apart, first in its content.
How do the planets actually move?
The content has broken. Next the method breaks.
How should anyone find anything out?
Not everyone is pleased about the new confidence in progress.
Has progress in the sciences and arts made people better?
Meanwhile institutions are being designed by arithmetic.
How should an institution be arranged?
Bacon's confidence in method hardens into a doctrine about knowledge itself.
What counts as real knowledge?
Kuhn's target. A paradigm is a context, so the first of the three goes.
Does science accumulate steadily toward the truth?
If the shape of a science can shift, the next question is who benefits from the shape it has.
What are modern institutions doing to people?
Kuhn says the content could have gone otherwise. Foucault says knowing has a politics.
In what sense is a scientific fact made?
Ad hoc Put together for the one case in hand, with no general rule behind it. Science is ad hoc and disunified and works anyway. Wittgenstein's games: solitaire has no competition, snakes and ladders no skill, ring-a-ring-a-roses no winner. No one feature is in every game, only overlaps, which he calls a family resemblance. So there is no scientific method, singular.
Contingent It could have been otherwise, and nothing made it necessary. Contingently real means a thing is genuinely real and could still have been built differently. Week 4 says that of knowledge, methods, disciplinary boundaries and styles of work.
Metaphysics The study of what exists, and of what things fundamentally are. The name is a filing accident. Compilers put Aristotle's book after his Physics.
Dualism A split of one thing into two. Schadewaldt's complaint is that modern thought split nature from spirit, thought from extension, and subject from object, where the Greeks had held them together.
Homer eighth century BCE The earliest writer the course reaches back to. The Odyssey relies on a cosmos with an order and a place for everything in it. That assumption is the ground everybody later argues on.
Heraclitus sixth century BCE Nature is in harmony. Sound thinking is man's greatest power, and his highest aptitude is being able to say what is and fashion creatively by hearkening to nature. Hearkening means listening, so the quotation assumes there is an order out there to listen to.
Aristotle 384 to 322 BCE Born in Stagira, never an Athenian citizen, studied under Plato, tutored Alexander the Great. Called the first biologist. The non-citizenship is why he had to leave Athens at the end of his life.
Geocentrism Aristotle The earth at the centre, everything else turning round it. Falls out of telos: earth's natural place is the centre, which is why a rock falls, so the earth sits at the centre too. Patient observation confirmed it daily for two thousand years.
The dialogues Plato Twenty-six of them, and Plato never speaks in his own voice. Socrates is almost always the speaker. He was a real person, and the Socrates in the dialogues is Plato's. So no line can be quoted as Plato's own opinion. The one set here is the Republic, and the cave is in book seven.
The Academy Plato His school in Athens, where the English word academy comes from. Aristocratic women are known to have attended it.
The cave Plato Prisoners chained facing a wall, taking the shadows for the real things. Out of the sensible world (what the senses reach) up to the intelligible (what only thought reaches), which Plato calls the journey of the soul. Being freed is painful and has to be compelled. The returner is laughed at; whoever unchains the others would be killed. It asks how we know what is true and what method to use, so it is a text about method.
physis Schadewaldt Nature, meaning the source everything grows out of. It carries movement inside it, which is why the Greeks used it to answer what makes things move.
techne Schadewaldt Skill at making or doing something. A person has to be involved, so it is never a part of nature on its own.
episteme Schadewaldt Knowledge of what never changes. Ranked above techne, which works on things still in the middle of becoming.
empeiria Schadewaldt Plain experience: you can do the thing and cannot say why it works.
atechnia Schadewaldt Making something confidently out of a false idea of how it works. His word for a blunder. It can be elaborate and productive and still be one.
telos Aristotle The end a thing is growing toward. An acorn is heading for oak. To know a thing is to know its end. The root of the English teleology.
Form Plato and Aristotle What makes a thing the kind of thing it is. Plato puts the Forms in a realm outside this one and makes everything here a copy. Aristotle puts form inside the thing, together with its end. That is why Aristotle could do biology and Plato could not.
Dialectic Plato Question and answer until opinion has been sorted out from knowledge.
Kalliopolis Plato His beautiful city, run by philosopher kings, where the right education is what holds it together. She wrote on her own slide that Foucault's perfectly governed city should make you think of it.
Philosopher kings Plato The rulers of his ideal city, described as awake while everyone else dreams. Their education needs geometry and astronomy, because mathematics is his route to what you cannot touch.
Empiricism Bacon The view that the senses are where knowledge starts. From the Greek empeiria, experience. Its opposite is the view that reason alone gets you there, which is Plato.
Induction Reasoning up from the cases you have seen to a law covering all of them. A thousand swans, every one white, so all swans are white. The law covers every swan there is and you looked at a thousand, so the cases never make it safe. Europeans held that one until 1697, when a Dutch expedition found black swans in Western Australia.
Foundationalism Every claim rests on a claim below it, down to a bottom layer needing nothing under it. The kettle boils at 100 because water does, because every measurement came out that way, and there the chain stops. The bottom layer is laid by induction, so it is the least secure part. Traced down through reasons, never back through time, which is Whig history.
Knowledge is power Bacon Know how a thing works and you can make it do what you want. He means power over the physical world, and he means it as a promise. Foucault later keeps the equation and turns it into an accusation.
Ant, spider, bee Bacon Three ways of working, two of them wrong. The alchemists are ants: they pile material up and do nothing with it. The Aristotelians are spiders: they spin systems out of themselves with no material coming in. The proper natural philosopher is a bee, who gathers and then digests. Novum Organum I.95.
Lynn White Jr. Religious worldviews decide which technologies get built. God is an architect, man is made in his image and told to rule the world, and Christian history runs one way toward a goal where other religions had it circling. So there is no time to lose and manual work becomes worship. Written against the view that economic need drives technology.
Deism Lynn White God as a clockmaker who set the world going and stepped back. Developing around 1300. Once the world is a mechanism, taking it apart to see how it runs becomes a pious act.
Comte's three states Explanation passes through three stages over history: theological, then metaphysical, then positive. Gods explain things, then abstract essences and forces explain them, then only what can be observed and measured counts. The third stage is where the word positivism comes from. Note that this is a progress story, which puts Comte on the opposite side from Kuhn.
The Vienna Circle 1920s and 1930s Philosophers and scientists holding that a statement means something only if it can be checked against experience. Logical positivism, with Moritz Schlick at the centre. The hardest and most organised version of the doctrine Kuhn's book breaks with.
Galileo 1564 to 1642 Found by looking that the planets revolve around the sun. The counter-example to Aristotle's patient observer waiting for the world to reveal its purposes. He went and got the answer.
Positivism Only what can be observed and measured counts as knowledge. So research has to be non-contextual (the result cannot depend on who ran it, or where, or when), standardised (anyone following the same procedure gets the same result), and analytic (isolate one variable, hold the rest still). Kuhn's target: a paradigm is a context, so the first of the three goes.
Realism There is one way the world is, and we can find it out and describe it accurately. Truths depend mostly on the natural world and only slightly on the people stating them.
Normal science Solving puzzles where the final picture is already agreed, and every piece you place leads toward it. A puzzle has a guaranteed answer, so failing one counts against you. The picture stays where it is. That asymmetry is what lets a field carry on through years of bad results.
Paradigm The shared picture a field works from, with the instruments, standards and assumptions that come with it. Her examples: Newton's mechanics, Lavoisier's chemistry, Mendel's genetics. Note how wide it is, because that width is what makes incommensurability possible.
Disciplinary matrix Kuhn's later and more careful word for a paradigm.
Anomaly A result the field cannot make fit, however hard it tries. They pile up, and a pile of them is what eventually breaks a paradigm.
Revolution The shared picture gets replaced, and the result that would not fit is finally explained. Not progress, because it builds and destroys at the same time, so there is no single direction left to measure.
Incommensurability No shared unit for measuring two paradigms against each other. Mass: fixed in Newton, changes with velocity in Einstein, so "mass is conserved" is true in one and false in the other. Three reasons: meanings of terms change, indoctrination, historical context changes. Counter-example: particle detectors survived a theory change unchanged.
Whig history Telling the past as a line of steps leading up to us. Kuhn's objection is logical: events have to follow their causes, so a sequence cannot be explained by the fact that it ended up here.
Copernicus 1473 to 1543 He put the sun at the centre and set the earth moving. Her framing, and she called it the important one: he needed the sun at the centre for circular motion to work. He was keeping an old Greek commitment to perfect circles, with no new data behind the move.
Panopticon Bentham A ring of cells round a central tower, where the inmate is always visible and can never check whether anyone is watching. Two windows per cell, so light crosses it and the occupant shows as a silhouette. The architecture does the watching, which is why one person can replace many.
Bentham's three words Visibility, unverifiability, and external power becoming non-corporeal. Non-corporeal means the power stops needing a body in the tower. Nobody has to be up there, so it costs almost nothing to run.
Utilitarianism Bentham The right action is whichever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. What he was actually famous for in his lifetime, ahead of the panopticon. He also spent much of his life on prison reform.
Three techniques of control Hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. Watch, rank, record. Hierarchical observation is watching arranged in ranks. Normalizing judgment measures you against a norm. The examination is where the two meet: it watches you and writes a verdict about you in one act.
Power-knowledge Knowing someone and controlling them turn out to be a single act. His gloss: the development of force and the establishment of truth. A file written about a prisoner becomes the truth about him and decides whether he goes home. Built on Bacon's knowledge is power, with the verdict reversed.
Normalization A norm gets set and everyone is measured against it, so people sort into normal and abnormal. She called it the goal of disciplinary power. Her examples are all places nobody is being punished: standardized education, medical practice, industrial production.
Docile bodies Bodies made useful and easier to control by discipline. Prisoners, soldiers, workers, schoolchildren. The body is broken into segments, analysed in detail, and recomposed for maximum effect.
Genealogy Studying how a practice came to be, without assuming it was an improvement. The method of Discipline and Punish, 1975. His puzzle: punishment really did get gentler, so what is the gentler method doing that the old one could not?
The plague town How Panopticism opens: the plague is met with Order. Sorting the disease, separating bodies, sorting evil, which increases fear and death. Its political dream is strict division and regulation reaching into the smallest details of daily life.
History of Madness 1961 Psychiatry's claimed neutrality covers for controlling people who break social rules. Her examples: homosexuality and hysteria. What was presented as objective discovery came out of questionable social and ethical commitments.