Power and knowledge: a foucaultian perspective on liberal objectivity and educational practice

Abstract

This project considers the implications of the later work of Michel Foucault for the liberal concept of objectivity, which informs liberal educational practice. Initially surveying how the liberal concept of objectivity emerged from the work of the Enlightenment thinkers, -the project continues with a criticism of this concept ill the light of recent developments in the philosophy of science. These developments have produced a novel and radically different conception of objectivity, which can generally be described as a pragmatic or instrumental one. It is shown hcv the concept of objectivity in Foucault's examination of the social sciences has affinities with the one emerging from the recent work of the philosophers of science. The liberal concept of objectivity in both the natural and social sciences is exposed as discredited. % e project concludes with a brief survey of the implications of Foucault's concept of objectivity for the relationship of educational practice to political change..