The analytical notions of ‘thought style’, ‘paradigm’, ‘episteme’ and ‘style of reasoning’ are some of the most popular frameworks in the history and philosophy of science. Although their proponents, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ian Hacking, are all part of the same philosophical tradition that closely connects history and philosophy, the extent to which they share similar assumptions and objectives is still under debate. In the first part of the paper, I shall argue that, despite the fact that (...) these four thinkers disagree on certain assumptions, their frameworks have the same explanatory goal – to understand how objectivity is possible. I shall present this goal as a necessary element of a common project -- that of historicising Kant's a priori. In the second part of the paper, I shall make an instrumental use of the insights of these four thinkers to form a new model for studying objectivity. I shall also propose a layered diagram that allows the differences between the frameworks to be mapped, while acknowledging their similarities. This diagram will show that the frameworks of style of reasoning and episteme illuminate conditions of possibility that lie at a deeper level than those considered by thought styles and paradigm. (shrink)

There are many ways in which biases can enter processes of scientific reasoning. One of these is what Ludwik Fleck has called a “harmony of illusions”. In this paper, Fleck’s ideas on the relevance of social mechanisms in epistemic processes and his detailed description of publication processes in science will be used as a starting point to investigate the connection between cognitive processes, social dynamics, and biases in this context. Despite its usefulness as a first step towards a more detailed (...) analysis, Fleck’s account needs to be updated in order to take the developments of digital communication technologies of the 21st century into account. Taking a closer look at today’s practices of science communication shows that information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a major role here. By presenting a detailed case study concerning the database SCOPUS, the question will be investigated how such ICTs can influence the division of epistemic labour. The result will be that they potentially undermine the epistemic benefits of social dynamics in science communication due to their inherent tendency to reduce the diversity of scientific hypotheses and ideas. (shrink)

Without doubt, there is a great diversity of scientific images both with regard to their appearances and their functions. Diagrams, photographs, drawings, etc. serve as evidence in publications, as eye-catchers in presentations, as surrogates for the research object in scientific reasoning. This fact has been highlighted by Stephen M. Downes who takes this diversity as a reason to argue against a unifying representation-based account of how visualisations play their epistemic role in science. In the following paper, I will suggest an (...) alternative explanation of the diversity of scientific images. This account refers to processes which are caused by the social setting of science. What exactly is meant by this, I will spell out with the aid of Ludwik Fleck’s theory of the social mechanisms of scientific communication. (shrink)

In this paper I try to 'rethink' consistency as an educational quality for the 3rd millennium, following Italo Calvino's choice to take it up in his lecture series Memos for the Next Millennium, and despite the fact that the (final) lecture devoted to this quality remained unwritten. After reflecting on how consistency already plays a certain role in Calvino's other lectures, I expand on the specific educational implications of this role's unresolved ambivalence, in order to argue that this ambivalence, properly (...) understood, might be fully constitutive of the educational significance of consistency. To achieve such an understanding I turn to Gilles Deleuze and his concept of style as a 'practice' of consistency. Not only does a stylistic understanding of consistency offer interesting possibilities for a more constructive approach to the said ambivalence—between consistency as static stability and dynamic keeping-together- but as such it also speaks to a number of issues that are directly and fundamentally educational in nature. (shrink)

Thought style and thought collective are two well-known concepts from Ludwik Fleck’s theory of science, which he originally formulated in Polish and German. This paper contends that these two concepts cannot be fully understood without a third—Stimmung/nastrój, which is one of the musical metaphors that play an important role in Fleck’s thinking. Because it is most often translated into English as “mood”, Fleck’s musical metaphors are mostly lost in translation, appearing as mere rhetoric. Only if and when we understand Stimmung/nastrój (...) in the musical meaning of attunement, we can fully understand thought collectives, for which Stimmung/nastrój is sine qua non, and thought style, which appears if and when a collective turns out to be an enduring and not a momentary one. (shrink)

This paper deals with Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thought styles and Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge. Though both concepts have been very influential for science studies in general, and both have been subject to numerous interpretations, their accounts have, somewhat surprisingly, hardly been comparatively analyzed. Both Fleck and Polanyi relied on the physiology and psychology of the senses in order to show that scientific knowledge follows less the path of logical principles than the path of accepting or rejecting specific (...) conventions, where these may be psychologically or sociologically grounded. It is my aim to show that similarities and differences between Fleck and Polanyi are to be seen in the specific historical and political context in which they worked. Both authors, I shall argue, emphasized the relevance of perception in close connection to their respective understanding of science, freedom, and democracy. (shrink)

Much of Ludwik Fleck’s work on the social constitution of knowledge, scientific facts, and objects of inquiry is informed by a specific use of transcendental arguments. This paper analyzes the ways in which Fleck looks for “conditions of possibilities” for the stylization and circulation of cognition. Following a brief discussion of his political agenda regarding science’s “cultural mission,” the paper offers a reconstruction of Fleck’s implicit concept of the transcendental. It is argued that Fleck addresses scientific truth as an ongoing (...) revealing and concealing of possibilities for doing research. By implication, the truth about a scientific fact is at once situated in scientific practices and transcended by a horizon of possibilities. The transcendental takes shape in Fleck’s social epistemology as a result of the reflection upon knowledge production’s “situated transcendence.”. (shrink)

In Durkheim’s central methodological argument for the theoretical autonomy of sociology, the delimitation of the subject matter of that discipline amounts to revealing the sui generis status of sociological facts. The latter are not reducible to material things, but they have to be methodologically approached as scientific facts whose reality is independent of the observer’s subjective experience. The sociological facts reside in the trans-individual conceptual frameworks of individual action. These are frameworks which transcend individual representations, motives, and interests. By implication, (...) the empirical character of theoretical sociology hinges on.. (shrink)