No Escape from Fleck

Previous articleNext article FreeSecond Look: Ludwik Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen TatsacheNo Escape from FleckFelix E. RietmannFelix E. Rietmann Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMy first encounter with Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact was an experience of painful catharsis (κάθαρσις: “purging,” “cleansing,” “clarification”). I had just graduated from medical school in Germany, finished up a doctoral dissertation about chemotherapy resistance in a neuroendocrine cell line, and was enrolled in a master’s program in the history of science in London. If anything, I wanted to take a break from clinical practice, get out of the lab, and engage with thick books filled with philosophical and humanistic ideas. Fleck’s treatise seemed to pull me right back to what I had just left—antibodies, disease entities, chemical reactions, and scientists. To be sure, I wanted to understand the historical and sociological conditions of science and medicine more fully, but did this really require reentering the laboratory and the clinic through the back door? Apparently it did; and I not only came to reconsider my own medico-scientific past but also underwent, as it looks in hindsight, a “rite of initiation” into the discipline of the history of science.1I begin this essay with my first experience with Genesis because it points to a challenge in taking, as I have now been prompted to do, a fresh look at Fleck’s book. When I first encountered the book it did, indeed, defamiliarize my previous mode of thinking and introduce me to a different “thought style” (p. 9). My retraining was so successful that now, as I reread the book at the end of a Ph.D. program in the history of science, many of its basic claims seem to me surprisingly quotidian—or perhaps it would be better to say prescient. One way or another, almost all of Fleck’s ideas seem to have become part of my daily tools of historical analysis. This is even more surprising if we consider that the book was written eighty years ago and thirty years before the history of science became Fleckian. In part, this review is an attempt at introspection, probing the question of why and how Genesis has come to look so familiar. I will proceed by tracing some of the ramifications of Fleck’s concepts in the historiography of our field, combining a symptomatic with an analytic reading. I will first revisit the “primal scene,” the introduction of the book into Anglo-American history of science through one of the most influential works in the field, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); then move to more recent works and approaches; and, finally, highlight a few questions that, I think, both Genesis itself and the fact that it still matters raise.2It is no secret that Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact provided a blueprint for many of the ideas that Kuhn developed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Still, it is striking how close the conceptual frameworks are, in spite of many small but important differences. Kuhn’s paradigms roughly correspond to Fleck’s “thought styles.” Both denote practical, theoretical, and metaphysical commitments that a group of scientists—a “thought collective” (p. 39), in Fleck’s terminology—share and that determine what is considered true and false. Both paradigms and thought styles are historical and change over time. Paradigm shift occurs through a revolutionary crisis, during which anomalies accumulate, a ruling paradigm is brought into question, and a new paradigm comes into being, representing, at the same time, a new scientific worldview. Thought styles in modern science similarly change through the genesis of new scientific facts that first occur as an anomaly, or “a resistance in thinking,” setting in motion a slow change in thought style that culminates in “a recreation of the whole world” (pp. 101–102). While Fleck’s model of the genesis of a scientific fact allows for more gradual and continuous transitions than do Kuhn’s revolutionary crises, both emphasize the close-knit nature of thought styles/paradigms, their cosmological implications, and their ensuing incommensurability.3 Finally, both emphasize the role of pedagogy and draw on Gestalt psychology to explain both education in and changes of scientific perception.The emphasis on pedagogy and scientific perception in Fleck also provided an impetus to more recent discussions in the history of science. For example, Fleck carefully considers how scientific illustrations (“ideograms”) are “stylized”—that is, how they express the perspectives of their respective thought styles or, in Fleck’s words, are “true to theory but not to nature” (pp. 33–35, 137–142). They contribute to the education of visual perception, thus becoming an immediate perception of meaning, or “ideovision [Sinn-Sehen]” (pp. 137–142). It is not difficult to see here the seeds of recent contributions to the role of visual culture in both epistemology and scientific pedagogy, be it in the form of “trained judgment” (“the necessity of seeing scientifically through an interpretative eye”) or, more broadly, in the context of the historicity of scientific observation.4 In the philosophy of science, too, Fleck’s concerns have become common sites, if not direct references. For example, his emphasis on the role of metaphysical commitments in modern science, or the “reverence for an ideal” such as “objective truth, clarity, and accuracy” (p. 142), is not far from current considerations of the role (and historicity) of epistemic values in scientific inquiry.5 There are many more examples of the fertility of Fleck’s ideas in and beyond the historiography of science, and Genesis provides a real treasure trove for thinking through the different strata of our disciplinary subconscious.As much as—or perhaps even because—Fleck’s book has been fully incorporated into the canon of the discipline, there are aspects that remain troubling and still raise difficult questions. Take, for example, the issue of truth and reality. Fleck intimately connects it to the social genesis of a scientific fact, and it is easy, though not entirely justified, to read many of his statements as radically relativist. He sees truth as historical and, to an extent, ephemeral—“in historical perspective, an event in the history of thought”—and as determined by a style of thought—“in its contemporary context, stylized thought constraint” (p. 100). He further elaborates that scientific facts create an “interwoven texture [that] bestows solidity and tenacity upon ‘the world of facts’ and creates a feeling both of fixed reality and of the independent existence of the universe” (p. 102). From this perspective, science does not fundamentally differ from religion or other thought collectives. To do Fleck justice, he did not consider his insight that scientific knowledge is historically and socially conditioned as skeptical or relativist. However, the relationship between scientific thought, reality, and truth remains a tricky issue both in the text and in today’s politics of knowledge. This is not to revive long-standing (and continuing) debates about scientific realism or the demarcation of science but, rather, to point out that the relationship between the history of science and the question of truth not only has a long history but remains a difficult, important, and, at times, troubling issue, as recent debates about “trust in science” and “fake news” may suggest.To conclude this essay, I would like to go back to the comparison between my initial and present experiences of reading Genesis. I found it uncanny to reread the book—in the Freudian sense of “strangely familiar.” This essay has been an attempt to explore some of this uncanniness. It is ironic—and here psychoanalysis meets Genesis—that such an attempt can only be a reflection of my present thought style—that is, of the history of science eighty years after Fleck. My discipline has found a Fleckian answer to this challenge: a thorough historicism. In exploring some of the conceptual ramifications of Genesis in the historiography of science, I have tried to travel another Fleckian road, to look at the broad and versatile applicability of his ideas or, to use his own words, “to maximize experience” (p. 51). Part of the irony and intriguing challenge is that these two roads—historicism and maximizing present experience—describe two pillars of the same thought style. There is no escape from Fleck, is there?NotesFelix Rietmann, M.D., is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in the History of Science and a Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. His dissertation project investigates the use of audiovisual media in the history of infant research and care in the United States and Europe in the twentieth century. Department of History, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA; [email protected].Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the research group “Rethinking Science and Public Participation,” at the University of Geneva, for comments on an earlier version of this essay.1 Ludwik Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (1935; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). For the quotation see Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Robert K. Merton, trans. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Fred Bradley (1979; Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008), p. 54 (subsequent citations of this translation appear in the text in parentheses).2 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1962).3 While I emphasize the similarities between Structure and Genesis to show the extent to which the book has, consciously or not, been incorporated into present historiography of science, it is important to note that it is also possible to read Fleck against Kuhn, as Bruno Latour has elegantly done in the postscript to the 2005 French edition of Genesis: Bruno Latour, “Postface,” in Ludwik Fleck, Genèse et développement d’un fait scientifique, trans. Nathalie Jas (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), pp. 251–260. Yet even Latour cannot help but see a certain familiarity in Fleck’s book; here, however, this familiarity is situated in its similarity to his own theories of actors and networks. I am grateful to Jérôme Baudry for pointing me to the postscript.4 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), p. 311 (quotations); and Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2011).5 Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); and Chang, Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism, and Pluralism (New York: Springer, 2012). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 109, Number 1March 2018 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697181 © 2018 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Babette Babich Pseudo-Science and ‘Fake’ News: ‘Inventing’ Epidemics and the Police State, (Nov 2021): 241–272.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76939-0_12Babette Babich Material hermeneutics and Heelan’s philosophy of technoscience, AI & SOCIETY 4 (Apr 2020).https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00963-7

Hindsight bias · Historical Medical Research and Treatments · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy and History of Science

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  Open Access•Babette Babich•AI & Society•2023

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• Inventing Temperature

  Haṡok Chang•Inventing Temperature•2004

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• Is Water H2O?

  Open Access•Haṡok Chang•Is Water H2O?•2012

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