It Ain't Rocket Science

Just a stray thought. (Maybe I'll start blogging here informally again just for kicks.)

During the course we proposed a somewhat simplistics but I think pretty accurate analogy: positivism is to Kuhn what structuralism is Foucault. The question is whether this analogy leads to others that are just as illuminating.

Maybe they do.

One way to look at positivism is as a doctrine (I hesitate to say theory) about what constitutes knowing a fact. So a positivists starts with a known fact and tries to figure out what it is that makes it known.

Structuralism (and I want to start with its application to anthropology, not linguistics) starts with "events". It provides an account of understanding an event; it tries to figure out what makes an event meaningful.

So we have fact/knowledge and event/meaning. The facts and what we know about them, events and the sense we make of them.

Like I say, just a stray thought. We'll see where it might go.