Saturday, October 02, 2021

Finding, Discovery and the episteme me hearties


I’ve always thought Foucault missed a trick, in Les Mots et les choses, by not devoting attention to the epistemological position of the term “discovery” in the 17th and 18th century. I don’t think that neglect was negligible, either – it points to one of the oddities of Foucault’s book, which is that it removed the conceptual history he was telling from the trans-Atlantic context of colonialism that was one of the great material events of his donnee. Not only trans-Atlantic, but Indian and South Asian as well. Restoring “discovery” to its place would both confirm certain of Foucault’s intuitions and shuffle the order of things in interesting ways – it would give us a handle on deconstructing Foucault’s text. Discovery is writ large not only in the period’s natural philosophy, but in its law, its ‘anthropology”, such as it was, and in the practice of adventure that traverses the disciplines. Discovery did an enormous amount of work at the time, legitimating a trans-Atlantic order that still exists, and that was built on top of the discovery myth.
“Finding” has no such royal pretentions. If discovery is a kingly word, finding is a jack in the pack. It is still related to the basic nature/culture divide, so a part of the raw essence of the discovery ideology, but there is a modesty in finding. It suits the contemporary sciences, where every researcher comes up with a “finding” – ah, the mock humbleness of it all! Natural philosophers, those baroque sages, came up with “discoveries”, a term that is hard to hide in the bureaucracy.
The above does not exhaust the semiotic career of finding, of course. One of the great childhood activities is finding. Partly this is because children are built on a scale that allows corners and pockets to assume a greater prominence in their world. Partly this is because finding is basic to a number of childhood games – indeed, Freud’s construction of the fort/da game is built upon a relational element, the finding. In a culture that takes the child as an image of the authentic person – all social vices scraped away – finding will have a certain innocent aura.
A casual search in Science, a journal that has been in existence for about 150 years, finds that finding as a noun came after a long career of x "finding" y - which meant concluding, or sensing, or becoming aware of, etc. Finding here is not so different from finding as a child's activity, although put to an adult purpose. By the 1890s there was some indication that all of this finding, all of this sticking thumbs in the vast plum pie of the world, was in need of a noun that was less charged with the imagination and projection of the subject than discovery. Of course, discovery was still around, and is still around as a candidate for finding, but it has become a little too boastful as a noun - it is more pop science than science. Finding migrated into science discourse from legal discourse - where the finding as a judgement has been an official term since the seventeenth century, as far as I can find. I believe it is Tony Gibbons who noticed the steady creep of judicial speech into other speech domains, and the consequent transposition of concepts of equity in ordinary life situations. But the creep of judicial speech into the realm of science has not been, as far as I know, extensively studies.
So this is the lost and found, or found and lost, of discovery and finding. Some future Foucault should note these things.

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