ABSTRACT
Alongside Putnam’s and Kuhn’s analyses of systematic knowledge we have a quite different enterprise: epistemology. It is, roughly speaking, Erkenntnistheorie as opposed to Wissenschaftslehre. The Order of Things is incredibly rich both in historical detail and speculative suggestion. There is nothing like it in English. But that is no reason not to bring it down to earth. The examples of Linnaean taxonomy or Comteian positivism are misleading in another way: they focus on proper names and famous philosophies. Foucault’s third hypothesis is that systems of thought are both anonymous and autonomous. The objects of a reading are texts: both “reading” and “text” are code words that show one is ideologically pure, and writes only of relations between inscriptions and never of a meaning beneath the words. With such an audience, and with no French word that means “meaning” anyway, Foucault has no need to argue that sentences are the object of study.
