Epistemological Break

Abstract

The next question that we need to pose is: how does ideology function? For Althusser, ideology always functions in opposition to sciences. Borrowing from Gaston Bachelard, a French epistemologist, Althusser employs the concept of the “epistemological break,” which he first used to periodize Marx’s work. Gaston Bachelard was a philosopher of science whose book The Formation of the Scientific Mind had a great influence on the postwar generation of French epistemologists, Althusser included. According to Bachelard, scientific knowledge should be understood and posed in the terms of obstacles. Scientific knowledge is entirely opposed to (popular) opinions because “nothing can be founded on opinion: we must start by destroying them.” In terms of scientific knowledge, opinions are the first obstacle that has to be overcome. In other words, the scientific mind does not permit any compromise with the opinion, in the sense of having opinions on the object we do not fully comprehend. It is because “for a scientific mind, all knowledge is an answer to a question. If there has been no question, there can be no scientific knowledge.” In this sense, for scientific knowledge, general knowledge or general opinion is an obstacle. In other words, according to Bachelard, in order for scientific thought to be truly scientific, it has to go through various stages of epistemological obstacles. That is to say, an epistemological obstacle is the moment of rupture, or the moment of break, that divides science (or scientific knowledge) from its prescientific past.