| Michel Foucault introduced a new form of political thinking and discourse. Rather than seeking to understand the grand unities of state, economy, or exploitation, he tried to discover the micropolitical workings of everyday life that often founded the greater unities. He was particularly concerned with how we understand ourselves psychologically, and thus how psychological knowledge developed and came to be accepted as true. In the course of his writings, he thus developed a genealogy of psychology, an account of psychology as a historically developed practice of power.;The problem such an account raises for much of traditional philosophy is that Foucault's critique of psychological concepts is, in the end, a critique of the idea of the mind as a politically neutral ontological concept. Thus the basis relied upon by all forms of subjective foundationalism is rendered politically suspect by the critique. This suspicion, however, turns back upon Foucault and raises for him the question of how he is to justify his own writings epistemologically if not by recourse to subjective foundationalism.;By turning to a non-foundationalist, but at the same time non-relativist, picture of knowledge advocated by Wittgenstein and Wilfred Sellars, Foucault would be able to ground his critique without falling into the problematic choice of relativism versus absolutism. The key is to understand that the important epistemological issue for Foucault is not truth, but justification. A picture is offered of knowledge as a set--or set of sets--of interlocking justifications, any of which can be put up for question, but not all at the same time.;On such a picture, Foucault is able to retain the radicality of the genealogical critique without falling into the decisionism he is accused of by his critics. Moreover, this picture of knowledge is of a piece with his view of resistance as local and shifting. |
