It Ain't Rocket Science

This blog supplemented a course I once taught at the Copenhagen Business School with Søren Buhl Hornskov. The basic idea was to read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge as manuals for producing "epistemological" descriptions. We were trying to put these theories into "reflexive practice" by using them as platforms to teach students how to understand their own disciplinarity.

The approach was simple. We asked each student to produce a short "statement" (in Foucault's sense) of something they "knew" in a sense warranted by the discipline that they were currently studying (a field within business adminstration understood in a broad sense). We then worked through the "doctrine of elements" posited by Kuhn and Foucault. That is, the students were to identify the ways in which their own statements or claims depended on the structure of a "disciplinary matrix" (invoking specific symbolic generalisations, models, values and exemplars) or the positivity of the "discursive formation" (invoking specific objects, enunciative modalities, concepts and strategies).

An important theme in the course was the sense in which "paradigms" and "discourses" replace "theories" as objects of epistemological analysis, once the historical contigencies of language are taken into account. And we offered some ideas about how to bring all these insights together using John Law's concept of "fractional coherence".