Netting Truth: Ludwik Fleck's Constructivist Genealogy, 2005

Barbara Herrnstein Smith Duke University bhsmith@duke.edu Netting Truth: Ludwik Fleck’s Constructivist Genealogy A slightly edited version of this paper appears as chapter 3 in Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP: 2004/5) 1 Netting Truth: Ludwik Fleck’s Constructivist Genealogy Truth, or the diverse types of situation to which we give that name, is, for the most part, a good thing to have. It is good, certainly, when friends are loyal, lovers faithful, their tears authentic, vows earnest, stories trustworthy. It is generally in our interest to know what’s up and what really happened. Not always, of course, or only: fiction and flattery, artifice and illusion, duplicity and pipe-dreams are also important, sometimes necessary, perhaps even, in their various ways, truthful, indeed sometimes supremely so--or so the poets have told us, though it’s not clear they’re to be trusted in such matters. In any case, good though it is for the most part, truth seems to be in trouble these days. It is not that we are lying more or making more mistakes than in the past; the extent of those acts and ills appears pretty constant over human history. It is, rather, that certain familiar ways of thinking and talking about truth are proving troublesome. The concept appears elusive, difficult or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other ideas--for example, fact, reality, or objectivity-that have also become problematic. The term appears discursively slippery, its meanings multiple, irreducibly diverse, unstable and unfixable. Worrisome as all this is, even more troubling, from some perspectives, are assertions to the effect that this is, in fact, the case. For, it is said, such assertions (flying, as they do, in the face of truth) demonstrate the decay of intellectual competence in our time (at least in the humanities) or the domination of the academy (at least the literary academy) by dubious doctrines, such as postmodernism and radical relativism. Or, it is said, such sceptical observations about truth (even if they are to some extent true) demonstrate the failure of moral responsibility in our time. For, it is pointed out, much depends on an untroubled faith in the simplicity and stability of truth; exposing the complexities of the concept or dwelling on the 2 ambivalent operations of the term that names it makes life easy for liars and charlatans, hard for those who know and tell the truth, and threatens to undermine the very foundations of law, education, science, history, philosophy, and progressive (or, for some, conservative) politics. 1 This situation is not, of course, altogether new. Alternatives to familiar, commonsense notions of truth have been proposed since antiquity and, also since antiquity, declared absurd, appalling, or dangerous. Some of those alternatives, no doubt, were and are such. Some, however, have been and continue to be found interesting and useful, at least from some perspectives. I shall turn to these below, but, first, a few more general observations. I The prevailing idea of truth in both formal and informal epistemology--that is, among academic philosophers and other people who talk about such things--is that a statement or belief is true if it matches up with the way things really are, independent of anyone’s statements or beliefs. This idea is quite venerable. So are certain objections to it, notably the observation that, since we cannot catch a glimpse of the way things really are around the corner of our own perceptions or descriptions, we have no way to assess statements or beliefs in regard to their reality-matching properties.2 Various arguments have been sought and found to disarm this objection, the combined current upshot of which is that, through the dedicated pursuit of certain epistemic activities, such as rigorous reasoning, trained observation, extensive archival work, close textual analysis, or controlled experimentation, we may be brought, if not all the way to a full frontal vision of truth, then at least increasingly close to it. The notion of truth as correspondence to the autonomously determinate features of an external reality is not only venerable but also serviceable in a wide range of informal contexts: for 3 example, in justifying one’s statements or beliefs to associates, children, untutored laypersons, and perhaps oneself (‘Yes, it’s true, the car keys are on the hall table--go look for yourself’). The notion does present difficulties, however, when invoked under conditions of seriously conflicting truth claims joined with seriously disparate grounds of epistemic authority and seriously divergent prior beliefs, general assumptions, and relevant aims and interests. Under such conditions, the conceptual problems involved in the reality-matching theory of truth--its dubious ontological and epistemological premises and the puzzles, paradoxes, and infinite regresses to which it leads when attempts are made to articulate it rigorously--manifest themselves as practical, including rhetorical, problems (‘Yes, it’s true, they found evidence of weapons of mass destruction—the State Department just issued a report’). As is well known and sometimes acknowledged among professional rhetoricians (lawyers, journalists, teachers, missionaries, politicians, historians, scientists, and so forth), the effective establishment of a truth, as distinct from its bare public statement, requires much hard work and many favorable social and institutional conditions, not all of which can be predicted or controlled in advance. Moreover, as is also well known among them, the task itself--that is, the establishment of a truth as such--can never be presumed accomplished once and for all. II The classic, commonsense idea of truth as correspondence to reality has been challenged since the end of the nineteenth century by a number of philosophers of generally attested intellectual competence and moral probity, including William James, John Dewey, and J. L. Austin, as well as by a number of continental (and thus perhaps naturally suspect) thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François 4 Lyotard. Over this same period, various related, more or less highly elaborated, alternatives to that idea of truth--and, not irrelevantly here, to the entire system of assumptions, definitions, and distinctions through which it operates--have been developed by scholars and theorists in fields such as the history and philosophy of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Some of these scholars and theorists (for example, historian/philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn) are/were Anglo-American. Some (such as anthropologist/sociologist Bruno Latour) are/were continental. And some are hard to place in any of these camps or categories but, perhaps for that very reason, of special interest in connection with the current wars of truth. Among this last group is the Polish microbiologist and medical historian Ludwik Fleck, already encountered in the last chapter. Born in Lvov in 1896, Fleck was, in his time, a distinguished scientist, specializing in immunology. His major work, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact [Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache], was published in Basel in 1935. As it happened, Karl Popper’s important book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery [Logik der Forschung], was published in Vienna the same year. Although the two works are topically related, the contrast and indeed collision of their titles could hardly be more striking; nor could the difference in their subsequent fortunes. One, Popper's, offers a logic: a formalization of the supposedly general features that define genuinely scientific theories. The other, Fleck's, offers a genealogy: an account of the emergence of a particular medical-scientific fact and a critique of the logicism of both classic epistemology and the philosophy of science of his time. One confirms the view of science as discovery, the uncovering of a truth always already there. The other implies not only the historicity of truth but, no less radically, the idea that there can be a time when a scientific fact does not yet exist. The latter ideas are familiar now but were, in the 1930s, distinctly peculiarsounding. And, indeed, though Fleck’s book received some respectful, if bewildered, attention from 5 his medical-historian contemporaries, it was Popper’s Logic that set the terms for mainstream twentieth-century philosophy of science. I return below to the historical fortunes of Fleck’s ideas, but, first, something more about those ideas themselves. Fleck was persuaded by his clinical and laboratory experiences as well as by his readings in medical and intellectual history that scientific facts are not prior, fixed, and autonomously determinate features of an external world but, rather, as he puts it, ‘event[s] in the history of thought’.3 As he saw it, the emergence and specific features of such events--what we come to speak of as facts--are made possible but also severely constrained by the social-psychological operations of particular ‘thought styles’ [Denkstilen]: that is, systems of ideas and assumptions and related perceptual, classificatory, and behavioral dispositions that prevail among the members of particular epistemic communities (scientific fields, academic disciplines, religious sects, and so forth) or, in his term, ‘thought collectives’ [Denkkollektiven]. ‘Truth’, he writes, is not ‘relative’ and certainly not ‘subjective’ in the popular sense of the word. It is always, or almost always, completely determined within a thought style. One can never say that the same thought is true for A and false for B. If A and B belong to the same thought collective, the thought will be either true or false for both. But if they belong to different thought collectives, it will just not be the same thought! It must either be unclear to, or be understood differently by, one of them. Truth is not a convention, but rather (1) in historical perspective, an event in the history of thought, [and] (2) in its contemporary context, stylized thought constraint.4 As Fleck goes on to explain, there are comparable constraints in every field of human production: for example, in music, literature, and painting, where not all stylistic choices are available at a given time to a composer, writer, or artist. In science and other fields of knowledge- 6 production, the operation of such constraints is experienced by members of the collective as ‘a signal of resistance to unconstrained, free, arbitrary thinking’ and interpreted by them as reality, self-evident fact, or objective truth.5 To be even perceptible, however, a fact must be in harmony with the prevailing thought style and aligned with the intellectual interests and other goals--for example, technological projects--of the relevant community. These two sets of constraints-limitation of choices by communal style and prevailing interests--are experienced and interpreted by members of the community as ‘objective connection[s] between phenomena, . . . conditioned only by logic and content’ and otherwise unmediated.6 Because historians of science and writers of science textbooks participate in this post-hoc experience and interpretation, standard descriptions of the ‘discovery’ of scientific facts obscure the social, institutional, and cognitive processes involved and make it appear as if those contingent connections existed a priori or were given in the nature of things. The only way to make those processes visible, Fleck believed, would be by means of a new field of study--‘comparative epistemology’--that traced the historical emergence and development of facts in their intellectual and social contexts. The centerpiece of Fleck’s book is a richly detailed, often hands-on account of the genesis and development of a specific complex fact, the so-called Wassermann Reaction, that is, an observable change in a chemically treated blood sample that indicates the presence of the syphilis pathogen. As Fleck recounts the story, the otherwise invisible processes and connecting lines that give this fact its scientific solidity come into sharp and often surprising focus. Specifically, one sees how the individuating features of each of the three components of the Wassermann Reaction (that is, the disease entity, the blood-testing procedure, and the pathogenic micro-organism, Spirochaeta pallida) emerge from the reciprocally shaping and sustaining activities--observations, hunches, and experimental manipulations--of countless physicians, chemists, biologists, and laboratory 7 technicians, as shaped by shifting popular and specialised beliefs about sex, sin, punishment, affliction, and the workings of the human body, coupled with changing tools and techniques of medical diagnosis and treatment, coupled with changing theories and related methods in chemistry and bacteriology, coupled with differently motivated but convergent public, political, and professional interests in diagnosing a certain ailment. Fleck draws the moral of his story this way: Historically, [the Wassermann Reaction] appears as the only possible junction of the various trains of thought. The old idea about the [tainted] blood [of syphilitics] and the new idea of complement fixation [as a diagnostic method] merge in a convergent development with chemical ideas and with the habits [of perception and behavior] they induce to create a fixed point. This in turn is the starting point for new lines everywhere developing and again joining up with others. Nor do the old lines remain unchanged. New junctions are produced time and again and old ones displace each other. This network in continuous fluctuation is called reality or truth.7 A network in continuous fluctuation--a rather striking metaphor for truth or reality! It may be compared with the epigraph of Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, a line from Novalis: ‘Theories are nets: only he who casts will catch’.8 For Popper, the net, an individually conceived conjecture, may catch truth. For Fleck, the net, a web of shifting, intersecting, interacting, beliefs and practices, is truth. According to Fleck’s central idea here, the statement or belief that we call truth and may experience and describe as corresponding to reality might be better described as extensively and effectively linked to and congruent with what we otherwise experience as stable, resistant, and real. Thus, another of his metaphors for interrelated systems of beliefs, perceptions, and actions--this one a bit mischievous--was ‘harmony of illusions’.9 The mutual shaping and coordination of perceptual, 8 conceptual, and behavioral practices; a stable and effective congruence among ideas, observations, and manipulations; a consonance among beliefs, perceptions, and actions: none of these comes down to the matching of beliefs or statements to an independent external reality--that is, to a classic or commonsense idea of truth. But neither does any of them come down to a denial of external reality in the sense of something other than our own statements, beliefs, or experiences with which we interact. The central ontological/epistemological implication of Fleck’s work and of constructivist thought more generally is not that there is nothing ‘out there’. It is, rather, that the specific features of what we interact with as reality are not prior to and independent of those interactions but emerge and acquire their specificity through them. In a compelling passage early in the book discussing what he calls ‘proto-ideas’ (for example, ancient Greek notions of elements and atoms, the medieval conception of syphilis as foul blood, or early rough ideas of micro-organisms), Fleck rejects the image of science as winnowing ‘true’ ideas from ‘false’ ones:10 Implicit in such a view is the dubious claim that the categories of truth and falsehood may be applied to these proto-ideas . . . .[But] their accuracy, truth, and value . . . .cannot possibly be determined outside their particular contexts . . . as they [these proto-ideas] were produced within a thought collective, different from our own, in a thought style different from our own . . . A general criterion of correctness for fossil theories is no more appropriate than an absolute criterion of adaptability for paleontological species. The brontosaurus was as suitably organized for its environment as the modern lizard is for its own. If considered outside its proper environmental context, however, it could not be called either ‘adapted’ or ‘unadapted’.11 9 For Fleck, it is not a matter of wrong ideas or false theories being corrected, disproved, or superseded by science, itself conceived as a monolithic epistemic agent, process, or storehouse. Rather, ideas that are more or less workable but still vague become refined, transformed, and connected to other more or less workable ideas and, in this way, develop over time into what are accepted as scientific theories--but which, as such, are subject to further transformation. Just as there can be no absolute criterion of fitness for biological species, so there can be no general criterion of truth for ideas, no way of assessing their epistemic value independent of the intellectual environments in which they emerged and to which they were ‘adapted’.12 III Genesis and Development is actually two genealogies. One is a cultural and intellectual history of the development of the concept of syphilis from the medieval European notion of a ‘carnal scourge’ to its early twentieth-century identification as a specific disease entity associated with a specific microbial pathogen. The other is a detailed account of the establishment of the Wassermann Reaction--that is, the diagnostically useful correlation between certain observable changes in a chemically treated blood sample and the presence of the syphilis pathogen. Fleck’s systematic reflections on the epistemological implications of these two interrelated histories amount to a highly original theory of cognition--individual, collective, and scientific--and, as such, operate as a strong and far-reaching challenge to classic views of knowledge. Moreover, as we can see more clearly now than was evident to his contemporaries, but as was certainly sensed by Thomas S. Kuhn when he came upon Fleck’s book in the late 1940s, they offer a compelling set of alternatives to both conventional intellectual history and conventional philosophy of science. 10 Genesis and Development was a remarkably innovative work in its time and remains one of the most theoretically radical texts in twentieth-century epistemology and philosophy of science. Although not itself well known, its intellectual impact has been substantial, largely as mediated by Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which adopted many of Fleck’s most original and challenging ideas and, since its own publication in 1962, made them familiar to a large segment of the academic community and beyond. Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’ and ‘scientific communities’, for example, bear a more than passing or coincidental resemblance to Fleck’s ‘thought styles’ and ‘thought collectives’.13 By way of Kuhn joined with Wittgenstein and also more directly, Genesis and Development was a major influence on the Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge and related work in the history of science.14 By way of Kuhn joined with poststructuralist theory and, again, also more directly, Fleck’s work has been important for corresponding and often convergent developments on the continent, including the ‘actor-network theory’ of technoscience associated with Bruno Latour and Michel Callon.15 Indeed, Latour’s Pasteurization of France, which recounts the formation, triumph, and dissemination of the microbe theory of disease, could be read as an epic--or mock-epic--extension of Fleck’s narrative of the Wassermann Reaction. Fleck’s reconceptualizations of truth, facts, science, and reality are not simple. Nor can the gist of his thought be given in a phrase or two. The articulation and elaboration of these ideas in Genesis and Development involve a number of novel concepts and conceptual connections, a good bit of substantively significant historical, sociological, and technical detail, the working though of a series of important theoretical implications, and the framing of replies to a range of potential challenges and questions. If one turns the pages of Fleck’s book searching for assurances of the reality of Reality or the ultimately objective nature of scientific truth, one will not find them. If one searches it through for possibly scandalizing statements, one will find a good number of them, such 11 as those already quoted here. If one’s engagement with Fleck’s text and with the work of the historians and sociologists influenced by his thought is confined to searches of that kind, then one’s understanding of constructivist views of knowledge and science will be quite limited. (One shall, however, be equipped to speak authoritatively to similarly uninformed audiences regarding the absurdities and perils of ‘postmodern’ science studies, including its ‘attacks’ on science, its ‘denial’ of reality, and its disdain for ‘the very idea of truth’.16) On the other hand, there may be no better way to begin to appreciate the power of constructivist views of knowledge and their role in contemporary science studies than through an attentive reading of Genesis and Development. Such a reading, as I hope to indicate here, offers a range of other rewards as well--though not commonly, in the end, the pleasures of being scandalised. IV ‘Must we conclude that epistemology is not a science?’ As depicted by August von Wassermann, the discovery of the reaction that bears his name was the result of a set of increasingly successful experiments by an individual scientist, with a specific goal, engaged in a highly focused search. To Fleck, however, this image of scientific agency and alignment of intentions, actions, and outcomes is clearly the product of retrospective selection and schematization. If one looks at the record of the events leading to the discovery, one sees not a straight line but ‘a meandering path’ that includes false assumptions, vague hunches, unsuccessful experiments, lucky accidents, and, at every point, the contribution of useful ideas, methods, and technical adjustments by many different people.17 Moreover, nothing about this is unusual; the discovery of the Wassermann Reaction is a paradigm of how scientific discovery occurs.18 12 Paul Feyerabend makes a similar set of points thirty years later in his epistemologically ‘anarchist’ treatise, Against Method. When we look at the historical record of the actual activities of scientists making discoveries, he observes, including such models of scientific success and propriety as Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter, we find, first, that there is no particular method that characterises those activities (on the contrary, they are multiple, various, and opportunistic) and, second, that they always include much that would be considered extra-scientific or downright unscientific (for example, social, political, and rhetorical efforts). If we require a methodological rule for producing scientific knowledge, Feyerabend concludes provocatively, we had better make it ‘Anything goes!’19 Fleck’s observations lead to a similarly provocative question. If, as it appears, truth is routinely discovered by error and accident, then how, he asks, can epistemology, supposedly the study of the grounds of valid knowledge, proceed? Must we conclude that epistemology is not a science? ‘Ist denn Erkenntnistheorie keine Wissenschaft?’20 As articulated most influentially by the theorists of the Vienna Circle, the proper answer to Fleck’s question is: No, epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) is not a science; it is a branch of philosophy. As such, however, it can establish criteria for distinguishing science from non-science, determine the logical propriety of claims to scientifically valid knowledge, and advise scientists (and other people) on the best ways to go about discovering truth. Fleck’s answer to the question is different on every crucial point: Yes, the theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) is, at least potentially, a scientific enterprise--but, to be pursued as such, its methods must be empirical, not exclusively logical; its goal must be to explain the phenomena of cognition adequately, not to tell good from bad science or right from wrong reasoning; and the successes of science must be examined as social, not individual, achievements.21 13 The problem that concerned Fleck most centrally was not the classic ‘What is knowledge?’ or ‘How do we certify that we know something?’ but ‘How does that which we call knowledge come into being?’ Exploring that problem meant seeking to understand the mechanisms of cognition at every level: those of the individual subject (scientist or layman) in the course of his or her lifetime; those of the social collective (scientific discipline or other field of knowledge) over several generations; and those that characterise science per se, as a specific sort of technical-cognitive enterprise, over historical time. Accordingly, Fleck conceived the new field of comparative epistemology as an exceptionally comprehensive enterprise. Multi-leveled and interdisciplinary, it included experimental studies in psychology, research in anthropology and sociology, archival work in cultural, social, and intellectual history, and observations of science and scientists onsite and in action. In his descriptions of the project and illustrations of it in Genesis and Development, Fleck drew no line between philosophy and the social sciences, or between psychology and sociology, or between any of these and social, political, or intellectual history. Each of these divisions, however, became institutionally significant in the decades that followed, and the various disciplines involved became increasingly mutually isolated and to some extent antagonistic. Thus, although a number of Fleck’s central observations, such as the rigidity of belief systems or the effect of prior expectations on perception, would be studied experimentally by social and cognitive psychologists, the two fields most immediately and extensively influenced by his work, the history and sociology of science, developed along lines quite different from--and often in determined contradistinction to-those of empirical psychology. Moreover, while the history and sociology of science, especially as assembled under the label ‘science studies’, became increasingly explicitly 14 constructivist,22 cognitive psychology, especially joined with artificial intelligence under the label ‘cognitive science’, maintained close connections to rationalist philosophy of mind and, in some places, operated as a stronghold of traditional epistemological assumptions and ambitions.23 For these reasons and related ones discussed later in this chapter, Fleck’s comparative epistemology had little chance of uptake through most of the twentieth century. As cognitive science, social studies of science, and philosophy of science become increasingly interconnected in our own era, however, something like that project may yet be realised.24 V The notion of truth, facts, or reality as the product of a ‘harmony of illusions’ is one of Fleck’s most important ideas, but also perhaps the most scandalous one, especially in the context of classic dualisms of truth and error, reality and appearance, and correspondence and disparity. For Fleck, pursuing a thoroughly naturalised epistemology, truth and facts are emergent effects, the products of general psychological tendencies and culturally and historically contingent social processes.25 The questions that interest him are how it comes about that something--object, entity, or state of affairs--appears what we call ‘real’ or that certain statements seem well supported or self-evident while others seem clearly wrong or absurd. Both in the questions he asks and the answers he frames, ‘appearance’ and ‘seeming’ are not opposed to ‘reality’ or ‘being’, but neither are they identified with each other: all these are seen, rather, as interpretations of experiences that are more or less collectively attuned, more or less stable, and more or less pragmatically reliable. As Fleck explains the phenomenon, the harmony of illusions is a product of powerful cognitive tendencies, among them what he calls ‘the tendency to inertia’ of belief systems. ‘Once a 15 structurally complete and closed system of beliefs [Meinungssystem] consisting of many details and relations has been formed, it offers tenacious resistance to anything that contradicts it’. 26 This tendency is not a pathology of thought, but the way all thought operates--in effect, a cognitive universal, but one with ambivalent features.27 On the one hand, ‘when a conception permeates a thought collective strongly enough, so that it penetrates as far as everyday life and idiom and has become a viewpoint in a literal sense of the word, any contradiction appears unthinkable and unimaginable’.28 For example, The prevailing associations of childhood with purity and of sexuality with adulteration have rendered children’s sexuality imperceptible . . . [in spite of] the fact that everyone has the experience of being a child and later lives not altogether isolated from them.29 On the other hand, ‘only a classical theory with associated ideas which are plausible because rooted in a given era . . . and communicable because stylistically relevant, has the strength to advance’. 30 In established belief systems, coherence among perceptions, beliefs, background assumptions, and material practices are preserved by ongoing mutual adjustment. The sense (impression, conviction) of the truth or validity of some statement can be understood, accordingly, as the experience of its consonance--harmony--with other perceptions, accepted statements, general assumptions, and embodied recollections of past and/or current interactions. This experience of harmony is an illusion insofar as we project it outward and regard it as an objective correspondence of statement and world, independent of the cognitive processes from which it emerged and of the other elements that sustain its coherence. The experience is also an illusion insofar as we explain it as the product of some privileged cognitive process (such as logic or reason as classically conceived) or some set of putatively orthotropic procedures (such as a particular ‘scientific’ method). But it is not an 16 illusion in the sense that there is some set of otherwise verifiable experiences that contradicts it or some otherwise cognizable reality to which it fails to conform. Fleck goes on to discuss what he refers to as the most active or ‘creative’ aspect of this inertial tendency of belief systems, ‘the so-to-speak magical realization of ideas, the explanation of how the dreams of science are fulfilled’.31 The history of science, he notes, is filled with stories about how a certain imaginative speculation or prediction was verified in fact--for example, the existence of a branch of the uterus corresponding to the ejaculatory duct, as predicted by Vesalius.32 But, Fleck continues, this is because observations of the data were unwittingly shaped to conform to the style of the relevant belief system. No such branch of the uterus as depicted in the old anatomy books is known in modern anatomy. Moreover, contemporary depictions of the uterus are no less stylised than the old ones, though in a different way.33 His commentary here is still powerful: It is true that modern doctrine is supported by much more sophisticated techniques of investigation, much broader experience, and more thorough theory. The naïve analogy between the organs of both sexes has disappeared, and far more details are at our disposal. But the path from dissection to formulated theory [and pictorial representation] is extremely complicated, indirect, and culturally conditioned . . . . In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature.34 VI Fleck was a mordant critic of the often crude empiricism of the epistemological tradition, especially as perpetuated in the philosophy of science of his era. Standard descriptions of scientific observation, he writes, are subject to a popular myth about how cognition operates: 17 The knowing subject acts as a kind of conqueror, like Julius Caesar winning his battles by the formula veni-vidi-vici, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. One wants to know something, makes the observation or does the experiment--and already one knows it . . . . But the situation is not so simple . . . [O]ne cannot observe or ask questions properly . . . until tradition, education, and familiarity have produced a readiness for stylized (that is, directed and restricted) perception and action.35 Fleck notes that Rudolph Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World (1928) was perhaps ‘the last serious attempt to construct the “universe” from “given” features and from “direct experience” construed as the ultimate elements’.36 Criticism of the idea is unnecessary, he continues, since Carnap himself has already relinquished it. He adds: [O]ne would hope that eventually [Carnap] might discover the social conditioning of thought. This would free him from absolutism regarding standards of thought, but of course he would also have to renounce the concept of ‘unified science’.37 The discovery and liberation (and related renunciation) evoked here did not take place, of course, at least not among Vienna Circle theorists or in the philosophical tradition they defined. Logical positivist/empiricist assumptions, ‘absolutist’ normative ambitions, and convictions of the ultimate unification of science continued to dominate mainstream epistemology for the next fifty years, along with the belief that ‘the social conditioning of thought’ was an obstacle to truth, not, as Fleck argued, a key to understanding it. The old epistemological dream was that, by some combination of rigorously rational methods--radical scepticism, reducing observation statements to incontestably self-evident elements, analyzing, factoring out, bracketing, and so forth--one would be able to eliminate (or at least minimise) the distorting, obscuring effects of sensory error, personal bias, or social influence 18 and arrive at (or at least approach) certainty in knowledge. In the philosophy of science, this became the search for a set of orthotropic methods--logically proper formulation and empirical testing of hypotheses, trained observation and controlled experimentation, the use of objective instruments of measurement and recording, and so forth--to the same end: to cancel out the personal, subjective, social, and political; to arrive at an accurate, undistorted representation of nature; to net truth itself. Fleck was not drawn to that dream. On the contrary, he was persuaded that scientific observation is inevitably shaped by collective assumptions and ongoing social coordinations and, furthermore, that such shaping and coordination are inextricable elements of the process that yields scientific facts. VII The term ‘thought styles’ is somewhat awkward and perhaps naïve sounding in English. Related but more familiar and perhaps more sophisticated sounding notions include ‘discourses’, ‘regimes of truth’, ‘language games’, and, of course, ‘paradigms’. Although they are not equivalent, each of these terms points to the existence and significance of established systems of linked assumptions, convictions, values, and discursive-technical practices—and, for Fleck, related perceptual and cognitive dispositions. There is no such thing, he insists, as unstylised--‘direct’, ‘pure’, ‘objective’--sensation, perception, conceptualization, description, or knowledge. A thought style is a disposition not merely to think or speak but also to perceive one way rather than another. Thus, for the members of a collective who share a given thought style, certain entities, categories, and connections will be especially salient and ready-to-hand and others less noticeable or invisible. These perceptual-conceptual dispositions are not ‘biases’, a term that suggests disabling distortions of otherwise clear or direct perceptions. Rather, and precisely because of how they constrain 19 cognition, such dispositions enable what we call facts to be known, what we call reality to be brought forth and experienced. Responding to the charge that the idea of a group mind (implied by the notion of a collective thought style) is ‘metaphysical’, Fleck replies that, yes, the idea is a hypostatised fiction-but what concept, scientific or otherwise, isn’t? Is the idea of an individual person, he asks, or an individual mind–or, for that matter, the structure or form of an individual ‘body’--any less the reification of a set of functions? How does one arrive at the structure [Gebilde] of ‘body’ as a specific form to be directly perceived? There is no doubt that in everyday life, with the several senses of feeling, pain, muscles, vision, we actually perceive ‘bodies’ without any difficulty . . . . But upon analysis these ‘bodies’ dissolve into functions.38 He adds a strong ontological (or anti-ontological) reflection: The boundary line between that which is thought and that which is [taken to exist] is too narrowly drawn. Thinking must be accorded a certain power to create objects, and objects must be construed as originating in thinking; but, of course, only if it is the style-permeated thinking of a collective.39 Thought styles are crucial to scientific observation and discovery: the condition, it could be said, of their possibility. In the absence of the habits of style-directed perception gained by disciplinary training and experience, a researcher’s visual observations in the conduct of an investigation are vague and uncertain: Confused partial themes in various styles are chaotically thrown together. Contradictory moods have a random influence . . . . Nothing is factual or fixed. 20 Things can be seen almost arbitrarily in this light or that. There is neither support, nor constraint, nor resistance, and there is no ‘firm ground of facts’.40 By the same token, however, the effects of thought styles on perception are the condition of impossibility of certain observations and discoveries. Thus, during the classical period in bacteriology (when the views and procedures of Koch and Pasteur were dominant), ‘the allpervasive power of practical success and personalities created a rigid thought style.’ ‘[O]nly a strictly orthodox method was recognized and the findings were correspondingly very restricted and uniform’.41 Because researchers during that period regarded all secondary changes in bacteria cultures as ‘pathological’ or ‘artificial’ phenomena, they ignored what bacteriologists now recognize as the fact of morphological variability within species. ‘If a [bacteriologist] of that time had been asked why this principle was accepted or why the characteristics of species were conceived this way, he could only have answered, “because it is true”’.42 The fact could no longer be ignored, however, after detailed observations of the variability of a particular species were made under controlled conditions and, no less significantly, ‘couched throughout in terms of the current thought style’.43 Fleck’s point here, once again, is that there are no pure observations, complete descriptions, or ‘raw’ data. All observations, including or especially those of a highly trained, extensively experienced scientist, are shaped and selected by prior belief and experience--that is, by the ideas, assumptions, and practical know-how that, operating together, induce the perceptual expectations and perceptual-behavioral dispositions that, duly mutually adjusted among the members of a collective, yield what we call (scientific) knowledge. Elaborating these points, Fleck introduces a vivid metaphor from musical improvisation. Noting that, in Wasserman’s laboratory, the indicators in the early experiments with syphilitic blood samples were vague and ambiguous, he writes: 21 [But it is clear] that in these muddled notes Wassermann heard the melody that hummed within him but was inaudible to those not involved. He and his co-workers listened and tuned their instruments to the point where these [notes] became selective and eventually the melody could be heard even by ordinary laymen.44 Like the uncertain and scattered opening riffs of an improvisatory jazz group, the early experiments performed by Wassermann and his associates initiated a process of selective production and mutual attunement.45 Here and elsewhere, the discovery--or construction or emergence or development--of a scientific fact is a process of gradual co-adjustment of assumptions, expectations, procedures, and observations among a group of people with common aims, a shared tradition, a history of collaboration, and (in this, too, like the members of a jazz group) a shared perceptual-cognitiveperformative style. Nothing in this process could be called ‘true’ or ‘right’ per se. But the product of this process, a densely woven network of extensively interconnected and mutually supportive elements, is a harmonious, satisfying, effective structure--a conceptually coherent, perceptually stable, pragmatically reliable set of ideas and practices experienced as right and fitting by the members of a community.46 VIII Thomas Kuhn, distancing himself from Fleck’s thought in his foreword to the 1979 edition of Genesis and Development, refers to the ‘vaguely repulsive perspective of a sociology of the collective mind’.47 Kuhn was probably alluding here to the association of socially conditioned thought with distortion or inculcation and perhaps to various studies, both before and after World War II, of ‘mob’ or ‘mass’ psychology.48 Such associations had been given substance in the 1930s and 40s by images of crowds chanting and saluting in unison, wildly cheering brutal leaders and 22 racist, jingoist speeches--images that would have been especially vivid for, among others, the émigré generation of Austrian and German philosophers of science and, significantly here, would have reinforced their convictions of and efforts to demonstrate a fundamental difference between science and ideology, truth and propaganda, reason and irrationality. Writing in the early 1930s, Fleck is aware of such associations but rejects the related convictions, distinctions, and efforts. He cites Gustav Le Bon’s account, in his The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, of a sighting by the entire crew of a ship of a small boat in distress with passengers calling and waving their arms for help, later identified by the crew as a drifting tree.49 Commenting on the story, he stresses the similarities of such effects to scientific discovery--as well as some important, but not conventionally framed, differences between them: This case could be considered the very paradigm of many discoveries. The moodconforming gestalt-seeing and its sudden reversal: the different gestalt-seeing . . . . The same situation obtains in scientific discovery, only translated from excitement and feverish activity to equanimity and permanence. The disciplined and eventempered mood, persisting through many generations of a collective, produces the ‘real image’ in exactly the same way as the feverish mood produces a hallucination. In both cases a switch of mood (or switch of thought style) and switch of image proceeded in parallel.50 Fleck’s reference to the reversal of perceptions here as ‘a different gestalt-seeing’ (rather than, say, as the crew’s discovery of the truth) prefigures and perhaps influenced Kuhn’s later and ultimately notorious invocation of ‘gestalt-switching’ in visual illusions to help characterise paradigm shifts in scientific revolutions. 51 The analogy aroused the horror of some mid-century American philosophers of science, who accused Kuhn of suggesting that 23 scientists’ choice of one theory over another was ‘irrational’.52 Evidently disturbed by the charge, Kuhn insisted that he did not intend such a suggestion and, in the course of restating his view, weakened some of its most challenging features.53 Fleck would presumably have responded differently, at least to the immediate charge; for his point here, as throughout Genesis and Development, is that an adequate understanding of cognition makes classic conceptions of both reason and irrationality obsolete. Fleck sees highly contingent cultural and political factors as significant for the emergence of scientific facts, but again, as with social ‘conditioning’, not as sources of bias or distortion. The Wassermann Reaction, he insists, is certainly a scientific fact; that is, there is certainly a diagnostically useful correlation between a particular change in the appearance of a treated blood sample and the presence of the syphilis pathogen. But that fact would never have been discovered if the European public had not been so anxious about syphilis; and they would not have been so anxious about the disease were it not for its ancient religious-metaphoric-emotional status as ‘the carnal scourge’ and its popular association with the sex act, heredity, and moral degeneration. (Fleck notes that tuberculosis, which claimed many more victims at the time, did not receive nearly as much attention.) Nor would the reaction have been discovered if Wassermann, working in a state-supported research institute in Germany, had not been pressured by a minister of health who, aware of recent advances in experimental biology in France, was conscious of national honour. These historically conditioned cultural anxieties and political concerns operated together to make the search for a diagnostic test for syphilis a significant scientific project in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. They also operated to provide a high degree of public energy, popular interest, and institutional support for its intensive pursuit. Nothing in this description of the significance of ‘external’, ‘non-epistemic’ forces suggests that the status of the Wassermann 24 Reaction as a scientific fact was thereby compromised. To acknowledge, trace, and specify the inevitable and indeed crucial operation of cultural, social, and political forces in the development of scientific knowledge is not to claim (or charge or concede) that science is fundamentally biased, corrupt, or in the service of power--though, of course, the effects of such forces are not always intellectually or socially benign either.54 IX [C]ognition must not be construed as only a dual relation between the knowing subject and the object to be known. The existing fund of knowledge must be a third partner in this relation as a basic factor of all new knowledge.55 Fleck’s elaboration of this rejection of the subject-object relation in cognition amounts to an epistemic relativism as flagrant today as it was in 1935. ‘[J]ust as the statement . . . “Town A is situated to the left of town B” is incomplete and demands an addition such as “to someone standing on the road between towns A and B facing north,”’ so, analogously, he writes, the statement, ‘Someone recognizes something’, demands some such supplement as ‘on the basis of a particular fund of knowledge’, or, better, ‘as a member of a particular cultural environment’, and, best, ‘in a particular thought style, in a particular thought collective’.56 For example, he continues, the statement ‘[Schaudinn discovered Spirochaeta pallida as the causative agent of syphilis’ is equivocal or meaningless without its particular historical-intellectual context. ‘Torn from this context’, Fleck insists, ‘“syphilis” has no meaning, and “discovered” by itself is no more explicit than . . . “[to the] left” in the examples above’.57 25 As it happened, another scientist, Siegel, also discovered protozoa-like structures and suggested that they were the causative agent of syphilis. ‘If his findings had had the appropriate influence and received a proper measure of publicity throughout the thought collective’, Fleck writes, ‘the concept of syphilis would be a very different one today’.58 A different set of diseases would be classified together as syphilis and a different idea of infectious disease would have arisen. ‘Ultimately we would also have reached a harmonious system of knowledge along this line, but it would differ radically from the current one’.59 Having laid out this hypothetical alternative in some detail, Fleck goes on to argue that, though logically possible, it is an ‘historical impossibility’: At the time Siegel made his finding, the concept of syphilis was too solidly established for such a sweeping change to occur, and a hundred years earlier, when the concept was still sufficiently adaptable and fluid, the intellectual and experimental-technological conditions necessary for such a finding did not yet exist. We need have no scruples about declaring Schaudinn’s finding correct and Siegel’s incorrect: for the former was uniquely (or almost uniquely) connectable with the thought collective, whereas the latter lacked such a connection.60 Two major points are being made here. One is that the acceptance of a theory as correct is not accidental, arbitrary, or just the product of social convention,61 but depends on the extent to which it can be linked to ideas already established in the relevant community within a more general intellectual and cultural, including technological, context. This is very different, of course, from saying that a theory’s acceptance is explained by its rational assessment or by its duly demonstrated conformity to the evidence--that is, by what are commonly seen as the scientifically legitimate and only alternatives to ‘arbitrary choice’, ‘historical accident’, or ‘mere social or political interests’. The second point, however, is that, for that very reason, it makes no sense to entertain historically 26 counterfactual scenarios in which some rival theory was accepted as correct or, beyond that, to speak of alternative theories as equally valid.62 Thus two claims usually identified or seen as logically entailed are here seen as quite distinct, with one prohibited by the other: because (a) the validity of a theory depends on its position in a network of historically specific connections, it cannot be the case that (b) alternative theories are equally valid. Bruno Latour makes a similar set of points seventy-five years later in We Have Never Been Modern, though more obliquely. Latour begins by distinguishing between an objectionable ‘absolute relativism’ that denies the existence of any common or transcendental yardsticks and a commendable ‘relative relativism’ that, taking its name seriously, recognises the central significance of relations and ‘rediscovers . . . the process of establishing’ them: To establish relations; to render them commensurable; to regulate measuring instruments; to institute metrological chains; to draw up dictionaries of correspondences; to discuss the compatibility of norms and standards; to extend calibrated networks; to set up and negotiate valorimeters--these are some of the meanings of the word ‘relativism’.63 He draws this moral: A little relativism distances us from the universal; a lot brings us back, but it is a universal in networks . . . . [T]he universalists defined a single hierarchy. The absolute relativists made all hierarchies equal. The relative relativists, more modest but more empirical, point out what instruments and what chains serve to create asymmetries and equalities, hierarchies and differences.64 27 In Latour’s account as in Fleck’s, the acceptability of a scientific theory depends on the strength, extent, and stability of its linkages in an established cognitive-technological network: its being connectible to already accepted ideas; its congruence with already accepted findings; its measurement by available instruments and techniques; its description in the prevailing conceptual idiom; its recurrent communication through established channels of social interaction; and its effective application in ongoing projects and practices. In both accounts, this means that the operative validity of a scientific theory does not exist--will not be experienced as such--outside such a network and cannot be described or assessed without implicit reference to one. In neither account, however, does it follow that all theories are equally valid. On the contrary, what does follow is that, in relation to a given network at a given time, linkages of the sort just mentioned (connections, congruences, communications, applications, and so forth) will be experienced by members of the relevant communities as stronger, more stable, and more extensive for one theory than for another. Thus, as Latour insists, the epistemic ‘symmetry’ or presumptive ‘equal credibility’ of theories posited by the absolute relativist is strictly hypothetical. It is always broken in fact--made asymmetrical and hierarchical--by the particulars of history.65 X Unlike Kuhn and to some extent Foucault, Fleck does not invoke radical discontinuities-‘revolutions’ or ‘ruptures’--in his accounts of intellectual history. To be sure, like each of them, he rejects traditional conceptions of scientific knowledge as cumulatively progressive and, like them, stresses both the contingency of the emergence of individual disciplines (or ‘discourses’) and the disparity and possible incommensurability of concepts and conceptual styles (or ‘epistemes’ or ‘paradigms’) in different eras. Fleck sees all these, however, as matters of ongoing more or less 28 extensive and fundamental transformation across multiple dimensions, in multiple domains, rather than, as in Kuhn’s Structure, of individually discrete cycles of normality, crisis, and revolution. This does not mean that Fleck’s views of intellectual history are less theoretically radical than Kuhn’s. What it indicates, rather, is that they are attentive to subtler and more heterogeneous processes and effects. In this respect as in others, Fleck’s thought is closer to Foucault’s than to Kuhn’s. These points can be amplified a bit. The idea of discontinuities in intellectual history are emphasised by Foucault in his earlier works (notably Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things) as part of a wide-ranging critique of conventional intellectual history, including its assumptions of smooth progress and what he calls ‘the teleology of reason’. By the time he was writing The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), however, with its focus on the multiple, heterogeneous strata and variable tempos of intellectual change,66 he was obviously finding ideas of ‘rupture’ too simple and such emphasis no longer as important. Although it is doubtful that Foucault knew Genesis and Development directly, there are extensive affinities between his thought and Fleck’s. Like Fleck, Foucault rejects the rationalism of classic epistemology and reconceptualises the ‘facts’ and ‘objects’ of institutionalised scientific knowledge as reifications naturalised through powerful and pervasive social processes. Thus Foucault’s accounts of the social construction of such ‘discursive objects’ as ‘criminality’, ‘imbecility’, and ‘sexual perversion’ in nineteenth-century psychiatry parallel quite closely Fleck’s accounts of the emergence of the particular disease-entity ‘syphilis’ and of the very idea of ‘disease’ in Western medicine. Along with Latour’s account of the emergence of such ‘quasi-objects’ as ‘microbes’ in Pasteur’s laboratories,67 these can be seen as paradigmatic examples of contemporary constructivist (anti)epistemology /(anti-)ontology. 29 There are, however, also major differences in their work. Fleck’s laboratory-instructed accounts are more attentive than Foucault’s to the significance of technical practices, such as measurements, manipulations, or the skills and habits of laboratory technicians. Also, with perhaps a stronger interest in psychological phenomena than Foucault or a less sceptical conception of the field of psychology,68 Fleck was more attentive to the operation of specifically cognitive-perceptual forces in the social construction of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, Foucault’s distinctly poststructuralist accounts are considerably more sensitive to matters of language and to the significance of discursive practices (description, enumeration, classification, codification, labeling, and so forth) in the construction not only of ‘objects’, such as ‘imbecility’ and ‘sexual perversion’, but also of subjects, such as ‘imbeciles’ and ‘perverts’. Most significantly, perhaps, while Fleck sought centrally to expose the disparities between prevailing ideas about scientific knowledge and what he observed as the processes of its production, Foucault’s concerns extended to the often dubious epistemic authority of science itself, especially that of ‘the human sciences’ (medicine, psychiatry, and so forth), and to the collaborations of the latter with political authority and established social interests. Experience suggests that these differences are liable to invidious reframing--as, for example, Fleck’s concern with ‘(real, material) things’ versus Foucault’s with ‘(mere, insubstantial) words’ or Fleck’s ‘(merely/genuinely) intellectual interests’ versus Foucault’s ‘(genuinely/merely) political’ ones. But nothing of either intellectual or political value is gained, I think, by such characterizations and assessments, which reinstate the conventional dualisms and hierarchies that both Fleck and Foucault devoted themselves to disrupting and obliterate the alternative conceptualizations that each of them labored to achieve. 30 XI As Fleck describes them, thought collectives are communities of interacting individuals who share systems of beliefs and practices: for example, astrologers, Lutherans, eighteenth-century European physicians, or early twentieth-century German serologists. As the examples suggest, such collectives vary considerably in size, scope, and duration, and any individual is likely to be a member of several of them. The latter point is important in explaining how original ideas or ideas that run counter to the prevailing thought style of a collective can arise. Part of the answer is that novel ideas are not simply adjusted to fit prior convictions but that all the components of a belief system, including individual beliefs, general background assumptions, and ongoing perceptual and behavioral practices, are mutually adjusted to maintain their overall coherence. This means that anything and everything--beliefs, assumptions, perceptions, or practices--can change while the harmony of the system as such is maintained. Contrary, then, to common misunderstandings and charges, accounts of cognitive process in terms of conceptual systems and thought collectives do not imply either the imprisonment of thought in static, self-confirming circularity or the churning out of robotic individuals doomed to social conformity. Even in the most confined and custombound societies, individuals are members of multiple collectives. Families and peer-groups, if nothing else, offer divergent thought styles, to which may be added, in more complex societies, schools, religious sects, political parties, and professional groups. Intellectual innovation arises continuously from the ongoing communication of ideas by individuals moving between different collectives (for example, different scientific disciplines); intellectual rebellion can arise from an individual’s experience of a significant clash of beliefs or assumptions between different collectives 31 (for example, peer group and family) in overlapping domains (for example, views of class, race, or gender relations). Fleck describes the organization and social dynamics of thought collectives in considerable detail, picturing each as a set of nested, mutually interacting circles. In many respects, such collectives operate like medieval guilds. At the center is a small inner (‘esoteric’) circle of the elite-experts and elders, master builders and laboratory directors. At the periphery is a large (‘exoteric’) circle--fans, audiences, lay people, and the general public. In between is a graduated hierarchy of initiates: students and amateurs, assistants and apprentices. Popular knowledge is of course affected (or, as usually seen, ‘informed’ and ‘enlightened’) by expert knowledge, but, in Fleck’s account, the converse is also true. Esoteric thought--for example, what is framed as scientific knowledge-itself draws on popular beliefs and, to be accepted in the collective, must be attuned to commonsense assumptions even if not simply a confirmation of them. The reciprocal dependence and continuous mutual interaction between outer and inner circles--experts and general public, specialised knowledge and generally accepted beliefs--is crucial in Fleck’s account. In scientific disciplines as in religious sects or political parties, these features operate to sustain both the coherence of the collective as a social community and the stability of the shared thought style. There are, however, important differences in the details of these operations, with significant social and intellectual consequences. Thus, where the organization is strongly hierarchical and the inner circle dominates (as in most religious collectives, Fleck notes), the thought style remains rigid and dogmatic. Conversely, where the organization is democratic and the degree of dominance between the outer and inner circles remains balanced, thought develops responsively or, one might say, progressively. The best example of such conditions, Fleck observes, is ‘modern natural science’. 32 Elaborating what he calls the specific ‘mood’ or ethos (Stimmung) of modern science, Fleck describes its characteristics, beginning with its expression as ‘a shared reverence for an ideal--the ideal of objective truth, clarity, and accuracy’: It consists in the belief that what is being revered can be achieved only in the distant, perhaps infinitely distant future; in the glorification of dedicating oneself to its service; in a definite hero worship and a distinct [tradition].68 As he goes on to explain, this mood is created and sustained by a set of social norms in accord with which the initiate learns that individual personality is kept in the background, that modesty and caution are valued, and that all research workers are presumed equal with regard to the acquisition of knowledge. Other important characteristics include ‘a reverence for number and form’ and, significantly, ‘an inclination to objectivize the thought structures that it has created’. The process of objectivisation occurs in stages, starting with the personal statements of individuals and moving increasingly toward depersonalised ideas stated in special technical terms, ‘a language estranged from life’ that ‘guarantees fixed meanings for concepts, rendering them static and absolute’. 69 Several points may be made here. One is that Fleck’s detailed observations of the structure, dynamics, and distinctive ethos--norms and characteristic practices--of modern natural science anticipated and/or proved exceptionally fertile for later twentieth-century sociologists and historians of science, both mainstream figures such as Robert Merton70 and those instructed in the largely post-/anti-Mertonian practices of the Strong Progamme.71 A second set of points concerns the political temper of Fleck’s views of science--or, rather, their lack of such a temper. As is clear, Fleck’s descriptions of the ethos and practices of modern natural science are neither idealised nor especially (self-)congratulatory. Thus he sees its ideals of objectivity and clarity as emergent and effective norms, not as valiantly elected virtues. But also, clearly, his descriptions are not ‘cynical’ 33 or even, for better or worse, ‘critical’. Thus he sees the typical ‘hero worship’, self-effacement, ‘reverence for number and form’, and arcane language of modern science as, again, emergent traits and effective norms, not delusions to be eradicated, bad habits to be foresworn, or stratagems to be exposed. These latter points require emphasis in view of common charges regarding the supposed politics of constructivist science studies. Thus feminists and other academic activists who regard science primarily as a tool of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, or homophobia (each of which, of course, it has been--even if the terms here, including ‘science’, are too crude) charge sociologists of science with being insufficiently ‘critical’ insofar as they merely describe scientific practices without exposing their political complicities and consequences. Correspondingly, philosophers and other commentators who regard natural science as the last, best abode of reason charge constructivist historians and sociologists of science (typically conflated with feminists and other scholar-activists) with ‘cynicism’ precisely insofar as they do observe its political complicities and consequences and fail ultimately to celebrate it.73 We shall return to these views and charges in the next two chapters. XII How did Ludwik Fleck--a research immunologist working in Lvov—arrive at all these original, challenging ideas about epistemology and the philosophy of science? And why, since those ideas were so original and challenging, was it not until half a century later that they became widely known? And why, since they remain so original and challenging and are now well known to a generation of historians and sociologists of science, are they still largely ignored by philosophers of science?74 Some answers to these questions are suggested by Fleck’s intellectual and 34 professional biography, which has implications both for the character—or, indeed, style--of his thought and also for its fortunes in the relevant collectives. Other answers may be sought in the broader cultural, intellectual, and professional worlds in which he operated. Fleck was a practicing scientist, not a philosopher or logician, and he was a biologist, not a mathematician or physicist. His knowledge of classical Erkenntnistheorie and current philosophy of science was broad, detailed, and discriminating, but he had no professional investment in either as a specific discipline. Although he read extensively in the history of medicine, he did not train as a medical historian or historian of science. In these ways and others, his intellectual profile is significantly different from that of other major figures of twentieth-century history and philosophy of science, both his contemporaries, such as Popper and the leaders of the Vienna Circle (Morris Schlick, Otto Neurath, Carnap, and so forth), and such later figures as Carl Hempel, Imré Lakatos, or Kuhn. Unlike all these, Fleck was an amateur and outsider in epistemology and the history and philosophy of science. But also unlike them, he was professionally familiar with the practices-technical, social, and institutional as well as conceptual--of several scientific fields over a period of more than twenty years. Each of these sets of differences cuts two ways. First, it seems clear that Fleck’s training in biology and life-long immersion in medical research shaped both the specific ways he conceived human behavior and cognition and also his broader thinking about truth and scientific knowledge. Certainly images and examples of organic development were readier to hand for him than they would have been for a physicist or logician. He was also more familiar and presumably more comfortable than they would have been with related ideas of emergence, flux, and holism. As we have seen, Fleck’s models and descriptions are typically process-centered and he depicts both cognitive and social phenomena repeatedly or indeed obsessively as interconnected, interactive, mutually dependent, and mutually attuned--dynamic, 35 organic, harmonious.75 In a typical evocation of flux,76 Fleck makes explicit the organic model that governs his view of historical dynamics, including his sense of the recalcitrance of those dynamics to logical description: The history of a field of thought cannot be logically reconstructed any more than the history of a scientific event, because it involves vague and indefinable concepts undergoing a process of crystallization. The more detailed and differentiated the historical description . . . , the more complex, interrelated, and mutually constitutive its concepts will be seen to be. An organic structure, emerging out of the mutual development of its interacting components, they are a tangle when viewed logically.77 Relatedly, he notes that older views and metaphors of warfare in regard to disease and the body-‘invasion’, ‘attack’, ‘defense’, and so forth, along with the idea of specific pathogenic ‘causes’ (a relic, he maintained, of archaic ideas of demon-possession)--are now recognised as dubious assumptions. ‘[The] organism’, he writes, ‘can no longer be regarded as a self-contained, independent unit with fixed boundaries’. Rather, he continues (citing developments in bacteriology, morphology, genetics, and physiology), it can be seen as a ‘harmonious life unit’ in which ‘the activities of the parts are mutually complementary, mutually dependent upon each other, and form a viable whole through their cooperation’.78 Like the relation between alga and fungus (the two quite different species of organism that constitute a lichen), the relation between host and parasite or between human body and pathogen could be seen as types of symbiosis, as could also, Fleck remarks, a community of social animals or an entire ecological unit such as a forest: In the light of this concept [i.e., symbiosis], man appears as a complex to whose harmonious well-being many bacteria, for instance, are absolutely essential . . . . 36 Thus, rather than as an ‘invasion’, we might better speak of an infectious disease as ‘a complicated revolution within a complex life unit’.79 In a revealing comment, he adds: ‘This idea is not yet clear, for it belongs to the future rather than the present. It is found in present-day biology only by implication, and has yet to be sorted out in detail’.80 Indeed, the idea is even now both radical and controversial.81 Something of the intellectual-professional background of Fleck’s organic models can be glimpsed through his account of important conceptual shifts in contemporary immunology, which was, in effect, his own major thought collective. He writes: ‘[I]nstead of the prejudicial concept of immunity [protection against invasion from outside], we have the general concept of allergy (a changed mode of reception) [;] . . . ‘[i]nstead of antibodies, we speak of reagins to stress the lack of direction of the effect’. He explains these shifts as follows: Many classical concepts of the field of immunology evolved at a time when, under the influence of the great chemical successes in physiology, misguided attempts were made to explain the whole, or almost the whole, of biology in terms of effects produced by chemically defined substances . . . . This primitive scheme is now being abandoned . . . . We now speak of states and structures rather than substances to express the possibility that a complex chemico-physico-morphological state is responsible for the changed mode of reaction, instead of chemically defined substances or their mixtures being the cause.82 What Fleck and his fellow immunologists saw as misguided in these earlier efforts were, first, the description and explanation of complex biological transformations in terms of unidirectional causes and the properties of discrete, autonomous entities; and, second, the general inclination to atomism, binarism (toxins/antitoxins, complements/anticomplements, and so forth), and reductionism. 37 Clearly, it seems, the models of biological phenomena that dominated immunology in the early twentieth century --‘under the influence of the successes of chemistry’--and were later rejected in favor of more holistic, dynamic, organic ones share crucial features with the models of knowledge that dominated epistemology at the same time, ‘under the influence’, we could say, of the contemporary successes of physics and logic. It was, of course, just those features of conventional epistemology--its atomism, binarism, agent-centeredness, reductionism, and unilateralunidirectional conceptions of causality--that Fleck rejected most strenuously in Genesis and Development. And, as we have seen, the models of cognition with which he sought to replace them are, like those of his own succeeding generation of immunologists, overwhelmingly holistic, dynamic, distributed, and reciprocal. Some general observations can be made here. One is that certain key features of the specific cognitive style and related habits of perception, description, and explanation that Fleck acquired as a biologist and immunologist evidently carried over into his ways of thinking about knowledge and science and shaped both his tastes and aversions in epistemology. A second observation also concerns relations between thought styles, but has broader implications. It is unlikely that the researchers and theorists whose models Fleck rejected (substance-focused chemists, immunologists of a previous generation, logical positivist philosophers of science) would have denied the complexity, variability, interconnectedness, and mutual dependence of the phenomena in question-infectious diseases, human cognition, scientific discoveries, and so forth. It is, rather, that, whereas they would have seen simplification and idealization, along with the search for fundamental elements, ultimate causal agents, and basic mechanisms, as the best way to go about studying and explaining those phenomena, Fleck saw such approaches as failing to do the phenomena justice or as only obscuring their constitutive complexities. It is as if, for the former (researchers and 38 theorists), giving an adequate account of a phenomenon meant reducing it to its simplest and most basic components while, for Fleck, it meant specifying its connections and dynamics as fully as possible. So described and distinguished, neither thought style or intellectual-scientific approach appears plainly wrong or intrinsically ‘misguided’. Each does appear, however, to be precisely a style--historically, culturally, professionally, and perhaps to varying extents personally, specific. If now, seventy-five years later, we (or some of us) find a Fleckian style more congenial or naturalseeming, it is, in part, because we ourselves--heirs of the cybernetic revolution; practiced in the poststructuralist-constructivist critiques of binarism, reductionism, and unilinear process; surrounded by daily talk of and perhaps in the midst of daily experience with world-wide-webs, neural networks, actor-network theory, hyperlinks, feedback loops, self-organizing complex systems, and so forth--have become so deeply attuned to that style that it has become imperceptible to us as such. Although an outsider with regard to the philosophy of science, Fleck was by no means an intellectual loner, even in his most radical speculations and formulations. As just indicated, he had the company of fellow immunologists in some crucial intellectual tastes and, as noted in chapter 2, the company of some of the major social theorists of his era (Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, and Émile Durkheim among them) in some of his key ideas. And, of course, he was an insider with regard to science as such. The consequences of these aspects of his intellectual biography are evident throughout Genesis and Development. Thus Fleck’s observations regarding the shaping of scientific hypotheses by such non-‘evidentiary’ factors as laboratory techniques or specific disciplinary assumptions reflect his intimate familiarity with medical and biological research. Similarly, his appreciation of the role of popular beliefs and the significance of cultural and social forces in the history of science reflects his extensive knowledge of the anthropology, sociology, and 39 psychology of his era and his fascination with the details of medical history, from Persian anatomy books to priority disputes between German serologists. The fact that Fleck was a non-philosopher was not altogether a disadvantage for the development of his thought. Compared with those professionally trained in academic philosophy, such as Popper or Carnap, he was not as confined by its conceptual idioms, classic problems, or current issues and positions. Moreover, he had no commitment to affirming its value as a specific intellectual enterprise. Like amateurs more generally, he had the advantage of a certain kind of intellectual freedom and, with it, the possibility or even likelihood of a certain kind of radical originality. By the same token, however, and again like the amateur, autodidact, or provincial more generally (as a medical scientist in Lvov, Fleck was all three relative to the philosopher-logicians of the Vienna Circle), he ran the risk of intellectual crankiness, irrelevance, and, of course, obscurity. One of the reasons Popper’s Logic could not be ignored by contemporary philosophers of science was that it engaged so thoroughly the classic figures and issues of the field (Kant and Hume, verification and justification, the problem of induction, and so forth) and, furthermore, did so from a thoroughly philosophical perspective. Fleck, on the other hand, who regarded ‘speculative epistemology’ (precisely because speculative--that is, non-empirical) as obsolete, pretty much ignores the history of Western philosophy altogether. No less significantly, Popper’s Logic is attuned--in its categories of concern, field of allusions, and conceptual-rhetorical idiom--to the established thought style of Anglo-European academic philosophy. And that, of course, was the intellectual community and institutional platform--a relatively large and, at the time, prominent one, with a large and highly organised audience already in place--from which both his work and also his presence as an intellectual figure were launched. Fleck, however, had no standing whatsoever in that community, which meant, among other things, no philosophy students or 40 academic colleagues to circulate his ideas. No matter how strenuous Popper’s challenge to dominant logical positivist assumptions and methods (and the extent of that challenge remains a matter of dispute83), he still wrote as a philosopher to philosophers, whereas no matter how theoretically original, cogently developed, richly illustrated, and concretely documented Fleck’s ideas may have been (and they were certainly all of these), he wrote as a non-philosopher to an uncertain audience. Aside from historians of medicine (primarily, at that time, medical practitioners like Fleck), no one had any professional reason or intellectual need to read a book about the history of syphilis, even one provocatively titled Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact--at least not in 1935.84 What we think of now as the history and sociology of science were not yet specialized fields and, of course, there was no ‘science studies’ at all. When Kuhn, then a young American physicsstudent-turned-historian-of-science at Harvard, picked up Fleck’s book some fifteen years later, it was in a quite different institutional and intellectual context--Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Vienna; post-World War II, not its eve. Given the directions of Kuhn’s own thinking at the time and his sense of the energy and promise of his newly chosen field, he must have found in Genesis and Development just what he needed, that is, both empirical corroboration and intellectual company--which seems to have been why, as he suggests in the 1962 preface to Structure, he decided to follow up Reichenbach’s citation of Fleck’s book. Fateful footnote. One further aspect of the context of Fleck’s reception should be noted here, namely, the growing division and to varying extents antagonism between the empirical sciences and classic humanistic disciplines, both as cognitive styles and as institutional projects. In accord with the distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, theorised as such at the end of the nineteenth century and already quite sharp by the 1930s,85 academic philosophy increasingly 41 defined its missions and achievements in contradistinction from those of the natural and social sciences. Thus, although Anglo-American analytic epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science have wished to be seen as allied to the natural sciences in valuing rigor, formulating strict definitions and distinctions, and seeking to arrive at universally valid claims, they have not professed to be sciences among the other scientific disciplines. On the contrary, analytic philosophers commonly stress the definitively normative, foundational missions of philosophy as such, along with its rationalist commitments and strictly conceptual-analytic, non-empirical methods.86 Of particular interest in seeking to understand Fleck’s reception was the strenuous selfseparation of both phenomenology and logical analysis from what was described in chapter 1 as the heresy of ‘psychologism’--that is, the idea that questions of mind, thought, reasoning, or knowledge might be examined as psychological and thus, as it was feared or charged, merely subjective or merely empirical phenomena. In such a context, Genesis and Development, insofar as it became known at all in philosophical quarters, was likely to have been seen as too tied to empirical fields-psychology, sociology, and the history and practice of medicine--to be, as philosophers (still) say, ‘philosophically interesting’. Not surprisingly, then, it would be largely in other quarters and not until half a century later that its intellectual interest and power would be recognised. XIII We may return now to our general topic for some concluding reflections. With respect to the idea of truth, the central implication of Fleckian and post-Fleckian constructivist epistemology is that, although something like ‘correspondence’ is involved in the situations to which we give that name, it is not a matter of an objective match between, on the one hand, statements, beliefs, descriptions, or models and, on the other hand, a fixed reality, but, rather, a matter of the 42 production and experience of an effective coordination among statements, beliefs, assumptions, observations, practices, and projects, all of which are independently mutable but mutually responsive. As pragmatists have always maintained, ‘working well’ is a key test of the theories or beliefs we call true. The testing, however, is not a discrete act of overt assessment directed toward already formed theories or beliefs but a tacit part of the very process of their being formed under the specific conditions of their conceptual elaboration, social communication, and technological application. Contrary, then, to familiar charges, the pragmatist association of truth with effectiveness does not imply or permit the identification of truth either with personal convenience or with serving the ideological interests of some group.87 Given the prevalence of related charges and misunderstandings, I would stress two other final points here. First, in constructivist accounts of the emergence of truth or reality, our beliefs, theories, and statements are seen as continuously coordinated with our bodily actions and material manipulations. Thus the emergent features of the Wassermann Reaction are seen, in Fleck's narrative, as having been crucially shaped by, among other things, the effects of various laboratory manipulations: the decision by scientists or technicians to heat blood samples to just this or that temperature; their cultivating colonies of bacteria in just this or that medium; their adding just this or that quantity of a chemical reagent at a certain point in the procedure; and so forth. This crucially constructivist idea of the reciprocal shaping and coordination of actions, perceptions, and theories is quite different, of course, from the more familiar idea that theories are duly corrected, verified, or falsified by observation, experience, or being tested against Nature. Constructivism is quite distinct, in other words, from classical or positivist empiricism. Nevertheless, as should be clear, nothing in these accounts is conceived as occurring in, or issuing from, just people’s heads. Accordingly, nothing in them can be accurately described as idealism—at least not so conceived--either.88 43 Second, constructivists do not contend that what makes a statement or belief true is either just its conformity to some conceptual system, thought style, or paradigm, or just its being thought true by the members of some thought collective, ‘culture’, or ‘interpretive community’. These can certainly be seen as significant features of many of the situations that we name truth, but--and the difference here is crucial--such conformity or communal acceptance or do not bestow the putative ‘property’ of truth on statements or beliefs that would otherwise be, in some putative logical space, false. Such fundamental misunderstandings and consequent charges of absurdity (or solemn assurances, such as that by Susan Haack, that Richard Rorty and other ‘postmodernists’ have simply confused ‘the true with what passes for true’89) are products of the tacit, often complacent, assumption of the very concepts and distinctions that constructivist epistemology questions and rejects or reconceptualises. In view of the multiplicity of contemporary epistemic communities and the sharp divergences of thought styles, language games, and regimes of truth among them, it seems unlikely that any one view of truth--realist, positivist, pragmatist, or any other--will be universally established as true, at least not very soon. Currently, constructivist views of truth, knowledge, reality, and related concepts are proving interesting and useful to scholars, scientists, and theorists working in a broad range of fields, including artificial intelligence, cognitive science, theoretical biology, medical anthropology, science education, and the psychology of perception--as well, of course, as science studies, cultural studies, and literary theory.90 In finding constructivist accounts conceptually congenial and working with them in their own fields, these scholars, scientists, and theorists are not, I think, exhibiting incompetence, irrationality, irresponsibility, or a disdain for truth. Nor, the evidence suggests, do such interests, efforts, or tastes keep one from being a dedicated research scientist, or an honest, hard-working scholar, or an energetic and effective 44 political activist--if any of these is otherwise one’s aptitude or inclination. The worst that a sympathy with constructivist ideas might do right now is threaten an otherwise promising career in analytic philosophy. But it might not do that either.91 XIV A final biographical note on Fleck. A few years after the original publication of Genesis and Development, Fleck--a Polish Jew--was arrested by the Nazis and sent first to Auschwitz, then to Buchenwald. Forced at both camps to make typhus vaccine for the German army, he survived the war, immigrated to Israel, and continued up to his death in 1961 to pursue his work both as a microbiologist and as a theorist of science, truth, and reality.93 Fleck’s wartime experiences did not appear to change his basic views on any of these topics. He remained an admirer of what he saw as the essentially democratic and intellectually progressive ethos of science; and he remained what we must call, it seems, a radical relativist. Notes 1. Examples of such views are commonplace. For the charge of incompetence in the humanities, see, e.g., Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition, pp. 71-106; Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense; Koertge (ed.), A House Built on Sand, pp. 3-6, 9-31, 59-70, 272-85. For the charge of intellectual and moral irresponsibility, see, e.g., Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, p. xii. For the idea that post-Reformation intellectual developments in the West make life easier for liars, see Fernandez-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed, pp. 194-5. For charges of political complicity by ‘postmodernists’, see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 378-9; and Norris, Uncritical Theory. In the past decade, a number of British philosophers have 45 undertaken defenses of truth against alleged contemporary denials of it, with Richard Rorty usually indicated as chief miscreant. See, e.g., Diamond, ‘Truth: Defenders, Debunkers, Despisers’; Haack, ‘Concern for Truth’; B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness. Although they differ in scope and sophistication, all appeal to some undefined, presumably unproblematic, commonsense notion of truth, stress the ethical and political value of truth (at least when invoked by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances), and deplore the damage to ethics and the polity wrought or threatened by the (alleged) views of Rorty et al. 2. Plato offered a correspondence theory of truth; Hume raised the familiar objection to it; the argument was internal to early twentieth-century logical positivism. For a seasoned summary of the major philosophical positions, see Davidson, ‘Epistemology and Truth’. 3. Fleck, Genesis, p. 100. In quoting Fleck from the 1979 translated edition, I have modified the translation at various points to restore the emphasis of the original or to provide more precise and/or current counterparts for Fleck’s often unusual terms and formulations. Passages where such modifications appear are indicated by the abbreviation ‘tm’ following the page citations, the first of which refers to Fleck, Genesis (1979), the second to Fleck, Entstehung (1980 [1935]). 4. Fleck, Genesis, p. 100. 5. Fleck, Genesis, p. 101/132, tm. 6. Ibid. p. 101/132-3, tm. 7. Ibid. p. 79. A more literal translation would be: ‘A network in continuous fluctuation: it is called reality or truth’. 8. Popper, Logic, p. 11. 9. Fleck, Genesis, p. 28. 46 10. The process is often compared, by a dubious analogy, to Darwinian natural selection. See, e.g., Kitcher, The Advancement of Science, pp. 155-7, and discussion in B. H. Smith, Belief and Resistance, pp. 139-40. For Fleck’s properly Darwinian analogy, see the passage cited below. 11. Fleck, Genesis, pp. 25-6/37-8, tm. 12. A parallel passage appears in Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, written at around the same time: It makes no sense whatever to suppose that modern science is more exact than that of antiquity. Neither can we say that the Galilean doctrine of freely falling bodies is true and that Aristotle’s teaching, that light bodies strive upwards, is false; for the Greek understanding of the essence of body and place and of the relation between the two rests upon a different interpretation of beings and hence conditions a correspondingly different kind of seeing and questioning of natural events (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 117). Heidegger does not extend the idea as generally as Fleck or pursue its implications in the latter’s naturalistic mode. 13. Kuhn reports reading Entstehung und Entwicklung in 1949 while a Junior Fellow at Harvard and, in the original preface to Structure (Kuhn, Structure, pp. xiii-ix), cites it as formative. In his foreword to the 1979 translated edition of Genesis and Development, however, he gives a more restrained account of the relation of his own thought to Fleck's (Kuhn, ‘Forward’). For an extensive comparison of the two works, see Babich, ‘From Fleck’s Denkstil to Kuhn’s Paradigm’. For observations on Kuhn’s reticence regarding his intellectual influences, see Nickles, ‘Normal Science’, p. 171n6. 47 14. For the Strong Programme, see Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery. For an indication of the diverse influences, see Barnes, T. S. Kuhn and Social Science, and Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge. For an account of Fleck’s thought in relation to later constructivist history of science, see Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, pp. 32-5. 15. See, esp., Latour, Science in Action and The Pasteurization of France. Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, and Foucault are among evident influences or explicitly indicated inspirations. 16. Not everything said on truth or science in the name of ‘constructivism’ can be explicated along the lines indicated in this chapter and much said (on truth and science, as on other topics) in the name of ‘postmodernism’ or ‘social constructionism’ is no doubt foolish or otherwise problematic. The range of labels and positions here, however, does not explain or justify the extravagant characterizations found in the works cited above (see note 1), characterizations that seem, in many cases, to be based on statements extracted in just the way described. See, e.g., the dismissal of social studies of science in B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, pp. 2-3. 17. A controversy between Wassermann and an associate over which of them was most responsible for the discovery, published some fifteen years after the events at issue, provides many of the details of Fleck’s narrative as well as evidence for his claim of a strong tendency to retrospective rationalization in personal biography and intellectual historiography. 18. Fleck, Genesis, p. 76. 19. See Feyerabend, Against Method, p. 14. 20. Fleck, Genesis, p. 76/102. 21. Fleck anticipates an objection to this conception of epistemology via the familiar distinction between the (mere) (context of) discovery of a scientific theory, seen as suitable for study by historians, biographers, sociologists, and psychologists, and its (ultimate) (context of) justification, 48 seen as requiring the skills of logicians and philosophers. His reply is that justification, though important, is internal to the process of science itself and that epistemology is improperly confined to the post hoc scrutiny [Überprüfung] and putative logical assessment of scientific theories (see Genesis, pp. 22-3). 22. See, e.g., Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge; Pickering, Constructing Quarks; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life. 23. See, e.g., Fodor, Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science, and Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong; Bechtel, Philosophy of Mind. 24. For surveys and discussion of these developments, see Hendriks-Jansen, Catching Ourselves in the Act; Longino, The Fate of Knowledge. 25. American analytic philosopher W. V. Quine proposed that, to save itself from irrelevance, epistemology must become ‘naturalized’, meaning informed and transformed by empirical psychology (Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalized’). Rooney, ‘Putting Naturalized Epistemology to Work’, discusses the quite limited pursuit of Quine’s project in contemporary academic philosophy. 26. Fleck, Genesis, p. 27/40, tm. 27. For comparable later studies in social psychology, see Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance; Nisbett and Ross, Human Inference, pp. 175-9 (on ‘belief perseverance’). I discuss these tendencies under the term ‘cognitive conservatism’ in B. H. Smith, Belief and Resistance, pp. 50-1, 84-5, 135, 145, 147. 28. Fleck, Genesis, p. 28. 29. Ibid. p. 29/43, tm. 30. Ibid. p. 30/43, tm. 31. Ibid. p. 32/46, tm. 49 32. In later philosophy of science, this becomes the argument for ‘scientific realism’ (that is, the view that what science reveals--entities, objects, relations, mechanisms, and so forth--is reality itself) from the supposedly otherwise inexplicable success of scientific theories in making predictions. For a good discussion of the argument and Fleckian-style exposure of the fallacy involved, see Magnus and Callendar, ‘Realist Ennui and the Base Rate Fallacy’. 33. For more recent views of the anatomical saga, see Laqueur, Making Sex; Shiebinger, Nature’s Body; Stolberg, ‘A Woman Down to Her Bones’. 34. Fleck, Genesis, p. 35/48, tm, italics added. 35. Ibid. p. 84/111, tm, italics in text. 36. Ibid. p. 177n3/121n3, tm. 37. Ibid. Fleck cites Carnap, Die physicalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft (1931), later translated into English as The Unity of Science. 38. Ibid. p. 180n7. 39. Fleck, Genesis, p. 181n7. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, aspects of which this passage may recall, appeared in 1927. There is no evidence that Fleck or Heidegger knew each other’s work. (See also note 12 above.) 40. Ibid. p. 92/121-2, tm. 41. Ibid. p. 93/122, tm. 42. Ibid. p. 102. 43. Ibid. p. 93. 44. Ibid. p. 86/113, tm. 45. Fleck was probably not thinking specifically of jazz improvisation in his metaphor of mutual attunement, but the analogies would hold for any form of collaborative musical performance. 50 46. The holism of Fleck’s view of cognition is quite explicit: The tenacity of systems of beliefs shows that, to some extent, they must be regarded as units, as independent, style-permeated structures. They are not mere aggregates of partial propositions, but harmonious holistic units exhibiting the particular stylistic properties which determine and condition every single function of cognition. The self-contained nature of the system, the mutual interactions among what is already known, what is to be known, and the knowers [die Wechselwirkungen zwischen dem Erkannten, dem zu Erkennenden und den Erkennenden], secures the inner harmony of the system but simultaneously preserves the harmony of illusions, which is quite secure [auf keine Weise aufzulösen ist] within the confines of a given thought style (38/53, tm). 47. Kuhn, ‘Foreword’, p. ix. 48. See Greenwood, The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology, pp. 109-35, for the intellectual context of Kuhn’s revulsion and the more general rejection of the idea of socially conditioned cognition in the decades following World War II. 49 Gustave Le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (1895), trans. into German as Psychologie der Massen (2nd. ed., Leipzig, 1912). Fleck rejects Le Bon’s own analyses (‘Le Bon . . . sees in any socialization merely a degradation of [individual] psychological qualities’ [Genesis, p. 180n7]) as well as those of William McDougall, The Group Mind (1920), and Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie and Ich-Analyse (1921). McDougall is rejected for treating the mass as an individual, Freud for seeing all the members as identical and their characteristic activity as following a leader who serves as a common ego-ideal. 50. Fleck, Genesis, pp. 179-180n7/146, tm. 51 51. Kuhn, Structure, pp. 85, 111-14, 150. 52. See esp. Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity. 53. See Kuhn, ‘Postscript’ (1969), in Structure, pp. 198-200, and, twenty years later, his ‘Response to Commentators’. For discussion of these changes, see Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions, pp. 204-5. 54. Pertinently here, one may recall the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, initiated in 1932 and conducted by medical scientists in Fleck’s own field, in which a group of African-American men with syphilis continued to be studied for forty years without being provided with or informed of known remedies for the disease (see Jones, Bad Blood). There are, of course, numerous other examples. For some of them, see Harding (ed.), The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science; Proctor, Value-Free Science? 55. Fleck, Genesis, p. 38. 56. Ibid. p. 39/54, tm. 57. Ibid. p. 39/54, tm. 58. Ibid. tm. 59. Ibid. tm. 60. Ibid. p. 40/55-6, tm. 61. Fleck specifically rejects Ernst Mach’s conventionalist view of scientific knowledge (Genesis, pp. 9-10). 62. The latter part of this second point—the denial of an equality of validity--is implied by Fleck’s argument. 63. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 113. 64. Ibid. 52 65. Latour’s ‘absolute relativist’, like the ‘postmodern relativist’ encountered in chapter 2, is something of a chimera, his or her position being made up of oversimplified versions of the views of constructivist theorists such as Feyerabend, Bloor, and Latour himself, views falsely attributed to such theorists by intellectually conservative philosophers and their followers, and, no doubt, views actually pronounced by some sophomores. Similarly, the ‘universal’ to which Latour says we shall be brought back by a due recognition of the ubiquity and inescapability of networks is quite remote from the classically conceived universal typically defended by such philosophers. Latour’s flirtation here with traditionalist positions may reflect his effort to distance himself from fellow sociologists of science, perhaps to avoid guilt by association and thus automatic dismissal, perhaps to imply a position above the fray. See B. H. Smith, Belief and Resistance, pp. 137-8, for further discussion of Latour’s argument here. 66. See, e.g., Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 6. 67. See esp. Latour, Pasteurization, pp. 79-108, 261-2nn19-21. The account in these pages seems to draw on both Fleck and Foucault, though neither is cited explicitly. 68. Given Foucault’s ethical and political concerns and his familiarity with the history and contemporary practices of medical psychiatry and psychoanalysis, he had good reason to be sceptical of those fields. The sorts of research in experimental psychology on which Fleck and Kuhn drew (e.g., studies of perception and visual illusions) seem to have been unknown or uninteresting to him, but Foucault was not alone in this ignorance or indifference among midcentury French intellectuals, especially those trained in the phenomenological tradition with its legacy of anti-‘psychologism’. On the legacy, see the discussions in chapter 1 and below. 69. Fleck, Genesis, p. 142/187-8, tm, italics in text. 70. Ibid. p. 144/188-9, tm. 53 71. Merton’s studies of the operation of the communal norms of natural science in the 1950s and 1960s independently duplicate various of Fleck’s observations (Merton was aware of Fleck’s work at the time only through Kuhn’s reference to it in Structure), and he subsequently sponsored, with Thaddeus J. Trenn, the 1979 English-language edition of Genesis and Development. Like Kuhn, however, Merton deplored later twentieth-century sociology of scientific knowledge, which he saw as raw ‘subjectivism’ and ‘relativism’ (see Gieryn, ‘Eloge’). 72. Fleck’s account of the stages of objectivization anticipates elements of the ‘textual technology’ of ‘virtual witnessing’ described in Shapin and Schaeffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, and the movement ‘from weaker to stronger rhetoric’ traced in Latour, Science in Action. 73. See, e.g., B. Williams, Truth, and Haack, Defending Science--Within Reason. Williams reads the current lull in the culture and science wars as a sign of ‘inert cynicism’ among the ‘truthdeniers’ (Truth, p. 3). Haack’s ‘cynics’ consist of ‘radical sociologists’, ‘feminists’, and other academics ‘unanimous in insisting that the supposed ideal of honest inquiry, respect for evidence, concern for truth, is a kind of illusion, a smokescreen disguising the operations of power, politics, and rhetoric’ (Defending Science, p. 20). 74. Philosophers of science generally know Fleck, if at all, only by name. Few of them appear to have read Genesis and Development and most, in my experience, are surprised to learn of its importance for Kuhn. 75. Readers familiar with the agonistic or, as it sometimes said, ‘militaristic’ idiom of science studies (Latour is the major figure cited here) may be struck by the proliferation of concepts of harmony in Genesis and Development. Most of these concepts, however, are readily assimilated to comparable ideas in contemporary history and sociology of science--e.g., to Andrew Pickering’s ‘mangle of practice’, which, like Fleck’s ‘harmony of illusions’ and in spite of the very different 54 metaphor, can be understood as the mutual coordination of conceptual, perceptual, and material practices in the formation and stabilization of scientific knowledge (see Pickering, The Mangle of Practice). 76. Fleck observes ironically at one point that epistemologists trained in the natural sciences see ‘human thinking--at least ideally, or thinking as it should be)--[as] something fixed and absolute [and] empirical facts [as] relative’ while philosophers trained in the humanities regard ‘facts as fixed and human thought as relative.’ ‘How typical’, he exclaims, ‘for both parties to find the fixed in the areas with which they are most unfamiliar!’ And, rather strikingly, he adds: ‘Would it not be possible to manage entirely without something fixed?’ (Fleck, Genesis, pp. 50-1/69, tm, italics added.) 77. Fleck, Genesis, pp. 53-4/72-3, tm. 78. Ibid. p. 60. 79. Ibid. pp. 60-1/81-2, tm. 80. Ibid. p. 62/82, tm. 81. See, e.g., Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition; Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information. 82. Fleck, Genesis, pp. 62-3/83, tm. 83. See Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism; Hardcastle and Richardson (eds.), Logical Empiricism in North America. 84. For recent studies of Fleck’s work from the perspective of contemporary medical theory, see Henk van den Belt, Spirochaetes, Serology, and Salvarsan, and Stig Brorson, On the SocioCultural Preconditions of Medical Cognition. Both deal extensively with Fleck’s constructivist views as such. 55 85. See Collini, ‘Introduction’ in The Two Cultures. 86. A twist on all this has emerged in the wake of the ‘science wars’, with the supposed exposure of a ‘collapse of standards’ in the humanities and, as detailed in chapters 2 and 5, the supposed takeover of scholarship in various fields by dubious ‘postmodernist’ doctrines. Accordingly, analytic philosophers appear more eager than ever to ally themselves with the natural sciences, now by way of distancing themselves institutionally from other presumptively dishonoured humanities disciplines. 87. For inferences along such lines in regard to pragmatist-constructivist conceptions of truth, see the works by Eagleton and Norris cited in note 1, above. 88. Certain elements of constructivist thought are congruent, however, with philosophical views of reality as in some way mind-dependent (on the latter, see Rescher, ‘Idealism’). The misunderstandings in question here are exacerbated in some quarters by conflations of the constructivism/realism polarity with the politically freighted idealism/materialism polarity. Accordingly, where ‘materialism’ is associated (e.g., by Marxists) with politically progressive views, constructivism, conflated with a materiality-denying ‘idealism’, may be under suspicion of politically undesirable or irresponsible implications (e.g., subjectivism, solipsism, and so forth). 89. Haack, ‘Concern for Truth’, p. 61. 90. For constructivist views in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, see, e.g., Port and van Gelder (eds.), Mind as Motion; in theoretical biology, see Maturana, ‘Reality’; in science education (primarily via the work of developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget), see von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism; in the psychology of perception, see, e.g., Blake and Yuille (eds.), Active Vision; in cultural anthropology, see, e.g., Gibson and Ingold, Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human, pp. 56 449-72. For recent explicitly Fleckian accounts in medical anthropology and sociology, see, respectively, Young, The Harmony of Illusions; and Steven Epstein, Impure Science. 91. See, e.g., Hacking, ‘The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences’, and The Social Construction of What?; Giere, Science without Laws; Longino, The Fate of Knowledge. These philosophers’ sympathy with constructivist views falls short, to various extents, of embracing them. 92. For Fleck’s descriptions of his experiences and activities in the camps, see Schnelle, ‘Microbiology and Philosophy of Science, Lwów and the German Holocaust’. For a selection of Fleck’s translated papers, including his writings after the war, see Cohen and Schnelle, Cognition and Fact, pp. 113-60. For further details of Fleck's life and career, see also Trenn and Merton, ‘Biographical Sketch’.