"Seeing and Knowing"

May 7, 2025

BC, Ch. 7 “Seeing and Knowing”

And the group began with questions…

1. Relation between logic/syntax and values (p. 113)? 

2. Getting clear on three loci (meeting place of doctor and patient): perception/observation; (2) gaze/language; (3) ideal of an exhaustive description (pp. 111-115)? 

3. Nothing known; at most recognition (p. 113)? 

4. Is Foucault here not critiquing the same thing as Sellars in The Myth of the Given? (p. 107-111). Is this also a proto-anatomo-politics? (p. 111)

5. Relationship between the gaze and the four epistemological myths? (pp. 111-117) 

6. At what level is something an epistemological myth vs. savoir? 

Discussions: 

Begin with Q6: 

—Myth is what historians/practitioners, etc., believe but savoir is a way of revealing the myth as a myth. 

—Structural feature of knowledge is what makes myths possible (since practitioners cannot excavate savoir from their own present). He states this in The Order of Things and also in Archaeology of Knowledge. Philosophically can you get sufficient critical distance to excavate savoir? 

Next Q4

—Good example M.F's description of "the myth of the given": "Over all these endeavors on the part of clinical thought to define its methods and scientific norms hovers the great myth of a pure Gaze that would be pure Language: a speaking eye" (114). 

[The myth of the given is the myth of the pure gaze, which is isomorphic with pure language.]

What is mythical is that constitution of a savoir is actually tracking things as they really are: "This speaking eye would be the servant of things and the master of truth" (115). 

    —An awareness that is not elicited by inference and it comes to us in a way that carries conceptual implications.  

    —The subject adds nothing, but is a vessel for that which is given to it (a notion of purity operating here). 

    —Ideal of a exhaustive description: "A precarious balance, for it rests on a formidable postulate: that all that is visible is expressible and that it is wholly visible because it is wholly expressible" (115). 

#5 Epistemological Myths 

—Myths mask an underlying savoir of the myth of the given? 

—Myth of immediacy and myth of transparency is used to masked the savoir.

—Underlying positivist empiricism and the myths mask that it is self-constituted as a way of knowing, viz. other possible ways of knowing; it is an episteme just like others.)

—Gaze introduces opacity and transparency—opacity becomes a problem when transparency is seen as a possibility?