Does Foucault's "power-knowledge" contradict the scientific method?

Question

I am trying to understand Foucault’s power-knowledge concept. It seems that Foucault viewed knowledge not as an understanding of an objective reality but a way to exert power? (1)

It seems that one theme that occupied Foucault was mental illness. I could agree that insanity is just a social construct. I doubt there is any objective criteria for who is sane and not. I also find it plausible that entire “sciences” have been constructed to justify societies view on who is sane and not.

"Western societies largely accept the findings of science as the most authoritative source of knowledge and this, to Foucault, was evidence that it was power-knowledge. He called this particular type of power-knowledge bio-power.” (1)

Again I may agree with this in the case of some social sciences. But the problem here seems to be that these "sciences" are not very scientific.

Contrast this with the physical sciences. Before Copernicus in 1543 showed that the earth orbits the sun it was “knowledge” that it was the other way around. According to Foucault’s reasoning this is just someone exerting their power. Who is this? Who benefits from us believing that the earth orbits the sun? Or Semmelweis who discovered bacteria. In which way did Semmelweis exert power over us?

It seems that it would be impossible to advance science and technology if people were to adopt Foucault’s views? Are there not problems that face us today, like global warming, that both requires us to believe in science, and technological improvements in clean energy?

(1) Helen Pluckrose: The enduring legacy of Michel Foucault

Answer 1

Foucault understood knowledge not merely to be disinterested enquiry but also a way of exerting power. Here, he's not talking about the power to inform or educate but the kind of power that places people in positions of influence and marginalise's others.

One specific notion he had was the notion of biopolitics. That is technology that is used to surveil the body politic. He was interested in the question of how demographics was used in early industrialised societies. This is an early case of big data. In todays world of big data and even bigger data this has become a huge political issue. Witness France Haugen's testimony about Facebook conduct to Congress and Parliament. She testified that Facebook was more interested in driving up growth at the expense of the social good. It was notable after this that Facebook scrapped their database of a billion prints for their facial recognition system.

This case is paradigmatic of what Foucault was talking about. Facebook is not interested in building harmonious communities - despite Zuclerberg's talk of connecting communities and nor is it interested in free speech. It is not in the market for altruistic reasons but to turn over as large a profit as it can. Like all market driven companies it is driven by the profit motive and this can and often is inimical to the public good. It's their power over impressionable young minds as well as older and more mature ones that legislators and law-makers are concerned about.

Foucaults notion has nothing per se to do about the scientific method but is really about how tyranny in a modern age can exert itself - a perennial topic in politics.

Answer 2

Consider for a moment the current Climate Change debate (or the somewhat older debate over the Theory of Evolution). In both cases, both the scientific and non-scientific side are simultaneously asserting truth and applying sociopolitical force to control the perspective of the other side. This is power-knowledge, and it is pervasive in human culture. I suspect that Foucault meant that power-knowledge is the essence of pedagogy (though I don't think he ever said that), because pedagogy always has three components:

1. The assertion that I/we know the truth
2. The assertion that you/they must learn it
3. The pragmatic political reality that I/we get to judge your/their knowledge, and punish any failure to conform or cohere

Despite Foucault's cynical and jaded approach to this topic, power-knowledge is a normal and usually non-problematic dynamic. When we first learn to drive a car, people tell us that a stop sign means to stop the car and look for crossing traffic before preceding. Most of us recognize that this piece of knowledge is meant to prevent car accidents, and thus represents a degree of power over our circumstances. Some people don't realize that, or don't care, and then we have systems of authoritative power — police offices writing expensive tickets, consequent increases in insurance rates, the potential for losing one's license to drive — meant to impose the truth that a stop sign means stop. In this case the body politic establishes a rule as truth, and sets up tests of that truth that every member of the body politic must pass, or suffer punishments.

Science is (perhaps) a special case, because science's form of power is (for lack of a better term) validation-shame. Basically, someone presenting a scientific theory to the world is saying:

• Here's a theory
• Here are cases where one can see with one's own senses that the theory works in practice
• Anyone who cannot or will not see such obvious pragmatic cases is too stupid or vain to be worth listening to

You may think that last statement is overly harsh, but that is exactly the attitude that anti-evolutionists, climate change deniers, flat earthers, moon landing truthers, and other anti-science movements are responding to: The presumed intellectual superiority of science.

Science advances when new theories shame old theories into quiescence. If you've read Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", he points out a number of such cases, where a new theory is proposed and a huge (and often nasty) squabble ensues. Most people initially reject the new theory. A few diehards who've made their careers on the old theory dig in as though it were a fight to the death. Over time the sheer empirical obviousness of the new theory brings most people around — they don't want the shame that comes from aligning with the hard-line diehards — and a new paradigm is formed. The validation aspect pushes the discipline forward (because no one will switch to a new theory that doesn't explain more than an old theory), the shame aspect solidifies it into a paradigm (because no one wants to look dumb by ignoring a better tool). The same is true in technology: who would stick with a land-line when a flip-phone is available, and who would stick with a flip-phone when a smart-phone is available? The validation of improvement and the shame of backwardness drive people in a certain direction. So even the seemingly prosaic aspects of science and technology are still manifestations of power-knowledge: the imposition of 'truths' through sociopolitical pressure.

Answer 3

I would invite anyone who believes that sanity is merely a social construct to come to my town and spend a week objectively observing the homeless schizophrenics on First and Second streets. The words "sane" and "schizophrenic" may be social constructs laden with silent context but the behavior exhibited by someone suffering from schizophrenia is not.

Knowledge can be easily weaponized in the interests of exerting power simply by denying it to the people you wish to oppress. So for example the Israeli occupation forces will not share with their Palestinian enemies the means of removing the crowd-control malodorant with which they load their water cannons to disperse rioters. Nor did the American authorities deliver the blueprints for the atomic bomb to Hirohito in advance of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.