Revolution, rupture, rhetoric

This article traces certain rhetorics of knowledge-change as well as a few models of such change. In particular, it focuses on models that emphasize novelty and sudden transformation. To this end, the works of Thomas Kuhn, and the debates surrounding his celebrated modelling of the paradigm, are explored. Having established" at least in an illustrative fashion" the role of novelty in Kuhn's philosophy of science, we then look more briefly at the mid-career work of Michel Foucault (his Order of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge), and the debate between JÏ‹rgen Habermas and Jean-FranÒ«ois Lyotard to find (in Foucault's case) analogies with the earlier models and debates surrounding Popper and Kuhn, and then (in the Habermas/Lyotard discussion), to see how revolutionary and reactionary status count in assigning value to models of knowledge. In all these inquiries, we seek less to criticize particular theorists (that has already been done) than to understand a dominant strand of understanding of knowledge and knowledge-change in the contemporary academy.