Views on Knowledge
- Although Foucault is regarded more for his work as a philosopher and social theorist than as a rhetorician, the theories which he posited in the The Archaeology of Knowledge granted perhaps more significance to rhetoric and discourse than had previously been suggested from within or without the field.
- To Foucault, rhetoric is not merely a way of transmitting and affecting knowledge, it is entirely the basis of knowledge in and of itself.
- Foucault did not recognize truth as a transcendental principle, emphasizing that ideas and the truth values that they may hold are dependent upon structures of discourse rather than truth as its own self-contained continuity.
- That is to say, knowledge is not an act of tapping into a well of yet unarticulated, universal constants, rather it is a vast and complex set of discursive and institutional relationships. Truth and knowledge are functions of discourse.
- By defining discourse as a "way of speaking" and studying discursive accounts in and of themselves without regard for collective meaning, Foucault defines "statement" as the most basic unit of things said, going on to explain that a statement is the set of rules which render an expression discursively meaningful.
- From statements, which are existence functions for discursive meanings, increasingly complex inter-related discursive structures emerge, in (and only in) the context of which meaning, knowledge, truth, et cetera can be designated.
- Consider that the language of speech, literature, scientific discipline, and mathematics are all series of statements existing within their own discursive communities. Therefore its truth value is appraised by its significance to the discourse of the community in which it is stated, rather than its adherence to a transcendent value.