Abstract

Foucault’s philosophy and history of science offer contradictory suggestions. His history of science is erudite, challenging, interesting, uncovering new and rich analogies between various disciplines. But his philosophy of science fosters problematic extreme anti-realism combined with elements of strong relativism. The style is rich in ambiguous, even dark pronouncements, often sounding bombastic. In the paper I develop the hypothesis that there are two opposing pressures coming all the way from the early structuralist model which I sketch briefly. On the one hand, structuralist approach is good for suggesting organizational principles, on the other bad in excluding issues of truth, explanatory potential of theories, and even their empirical adequacy. It has proved quite poor in offering explanatory tools on meta-level. If the pressure of evidence is,not seen as the prime mover of scientific change, and if change has nothing to do with the search for more adequate picture then the seduction of the power-model, with its political potential, becomes very strong. It is ubiquitous in continental philosophy of 20th century. I am afraid that the two components of structuralist heritage have been yielding a very mixed result: bad philosophy of science disfiguring the history of science. The interesting and challenging material from the latter is used for very dubious generalizations in the former.