The study of Epistemological Foundations of Michel Foucault's Paleontology

Michel Foucault has been an influential contemporary thinker. He made some serious criticisms on his predecessors and was influenced by some others too. Here we intend to study epistemological foundations of his paleontology in terms of a survey of his major key words related to this subject. Therefore, after we present a general scheme of structuralist Foucault and examine concepts such as paleontology, episteme, and discourse, we answer the following questions: how did Foucault define reality? How should one achieve it? Was Foucault a relativist? If yes, in what respect was he a relativist? What was the basis of his relativism? As an answer to these questions, one could say his paleontology was cohesive in the field of truth. The Theory of Truth Coherence bounds reality to the coherence of proposition and the given knowledge with a set of propositions. Foucault believes various realities buried across history must be discovered by a paleontological approach. Of different types of relativism, he chose ontological and epistemological ones. Through paleontological key words such as episteme and discourse, he started an endless path of epistemological relativism, whose criticisms would be discussed here in detail.