Science is history

Reading Chapter 5 of Foucault's "Order of Things" today and I'm liking the way he sees the 16th and 17th century drive towards rationality as a way of learning not so much how to know and document the world but how to see and speak of the world.

Some key quotes that stuck out for me today around this theme

Natural history...is the space opened up in representation by an analysis which is anticipating the possibility of naming; it is the possibility of seeing what one will be able to say [p.130].

The documents of this new history are not other words, texts or records, but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed...What had changed was the space in which it was possible to see them and from which it was possible to describe them [p.131].

What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse [p.131].

And while Foucault is talking about the role of the historian in this chapter, what strikes me about this is how little difference there really is between this and so many of the sciences outside of mathematics and physics.