Ludwik Fleck

Wojciech Sady
LUDWIK FLECK - THOUGHT COLLECTIVES AND THOUGHT STYLES
Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities
2001, vol. 74, pp. 197-205.

I. Ludwik Fleck (11.07.1896, Lvov - 5.06.1961, Nes-Siyona) worked in Lvov and Przemysl after receiving a medical degree from Lvov University. During his lifetime, Fleck published over 130 papers on various subjects in medicine. In 1935, he published his only book on the philosophy of science titled Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einfiihrung in die Lehre vom Denksfil and Denkkollektiv. At that time, his ideas passed unnoticed among philosophers of science. An important philosophical discussion between Fleck and Tadeusz Bilikiewicz about scientific realism was published in Polish, in August 1939, but it appeared too late to create any interest.

Fleck spent two years in concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Then, in Poland again, he was appointed professor of medicine at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin. In 1957, Fleck emigrated to Israel, where he died.

II. It was a common view at the beginning of the 20th century that the explanation why people created or accepted opinions of certain kinds was to be of psychological or sociological character: religious beliefs or philosophical systems are results of coercion exerted by social structures, economic interests, etc. on the thinking of individuals. But in the case of science, things were to be completely different: the content of scientific theories was to be independent of psycho-sociological factors; it was to be determined by (inductive and/or deductive) logic and experience.

The conviction of the decisive role of logic and experience was undermined by the conventionalist philosophy of Poincare and Duhem at the end of the 19th century. Fleck accepted their claim that reality can be described in many incompatible ways, but rejected their view that we are free to choose between theoretical systems. He applied the above-mentioned view that our choices in the field of religion or philosophy are socially determined to the analysis of the growth of knowledge that is usually called "scientific". Historical studies on the genesis and development of the concept of syphilis and the discovery of the Wassermann reaction convinced him that some elements of our knowledge - the most fundamental ones - are accepted, modified or rejected under the influence of social and cultural situations in which communities of scientists work. It is essential for scientific knowledge, that this knowledge is developed by communities - "thought collectives" - rather than by individual researchers.

A thought collective is defined as "a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction" [1.1, p. 39]. Thought collectives have their own structure that gives to our knowledge its particular character and determines the way of its evolution. There are relatively small esoteric circles of experts and much bigger exoteric circles of school teachers and people applying scientific knowledge in practice.

The system of beliefs common to members of a given thought collective - "a thought style" - is defined as "directed perception, with corresponding mental and objective assimilation of what has been so perceived".

It is characterized by common features in the problems of interest to a thought collective, by the judgement which the thought collective considers evident, and by the methods which it applies as a means of cognition [1.1, p. 99].

The training introducing one into a thought style is of a dogmatic character. Students attain competence in applying some principles, but their critical attitude to those principles is out of question. If they do not accept the set of beliefs common to all members of a given thought collective and if they do not master the same set of skills, then they will not be admitted to the community. Students are going through the process of initiation which introduces them into circles where everybody thinks in the same way. Disputes are possible about particular applications but not about basic principles and that is why what they believe seems obvious to them.

The individual within the collective in never, or hardly evar, conscious of the prevailing thought style, which almost always exerts an absolutely compulsive force upon his thinking and which it is not possible to be at variance [1.1, p. 41].

It is to be understood not as a set of constraints that society imposes on our cognitive practices, but as something that makes cognitive acts possible at all. The word "knowledge" is meaningful only in relation to a thought collective. And if for any reason someone formulates ideas that are beyond the limits of what is socially acceptable at a given time, they will remain unnoticed or misunderstood.

III. Within any system of knowledge active and passive elements can | be distinguished. The activd part consists of what Kant (wrongly \ interpreting classical mechanics as absolutely true) called synthetic a \ priori propositions, or of "principles" in the sense of Poincare. It is the product of our collective imagination. But when we apply active elements that we invented ourselves to the description of phenomena, we discover associations that we experience as "objective reality". It is psychology and/or sociology that can explain the genesis and primary acceptance of active elements of our knowledge, but passive elements are, so to say, results of the interaction between a conceptual system and the world. Passive associations are ascertained by individual researchers according to the framework inculcated in them by the thought collective.

The evolution of a thought style usually starts from some pre-ideas originating in a wide cultural surrounding of emerging discipline. Not in every culture could science have arisen, but only within the one in which suitable germs of modern theories appeared. If the culture is not homogeneous, then at the beginning many competing schools of thought emerge that perceive phenomena from different points of view and discover different associations on the basis of (sometimes the same) experiments. Various conceptual systems single out within our sense data different things, properties and relations, so in some important sense, facts emerge together with our words and "changes in thinking manifest themselves in changed facts" [1.1, p. 50].

It is not possible to see anything definite simply by looking. We need specific mental readiness to notice new objects or processes, to separate them from attendant phenomena, to describe them, and to turn them into subjects of collective investigations. And this readiness is taken over from our social environment. Facts are not something that is given, that can simply be pictured in (observational) statements. When we follow the evolution of experimental research concerning some phenomenon, we find out that experimental reports formulated at various times can be very different and even contradictory. The whole process begins with an observational chaos, blindly looking for something that does not change according to our wishes. In the initial stage feelings, will and reason play a role. The results of experiments often cannot be repeated. The simplest reports are of a hypothetical character. As scientists feel that hypothesis are their own - "subjective" - contribution, they try to get rid of them and to reach "objective" reality in this way.

The researcher [...] looks for that resistance and thought constraint in the face of which he could feel passive. [...] The work of the research scientist means that in the complex confusion and chaos which he faces, he must distinguish that which obeys his will from that which arises spontaneously and opposes it [1.1, pp. 94-95).

Something that from the point of view of a given system seems not to obey our will is called a fact. Any description of a fact consists of both active and passive elements, and as the active ones constantly evolve that implies transformations of passive ones, so "the results can be no more expressed in the language of the initial observations than, vice versa, the first observations in the language of the results" [1.1, p. 89]. The final results are products of long efforts, numerous trials and errors, acquired skills both manual and intellectual, and implicit as well as explicit knowledge.

A single experiment is of very little cognitive value; it is only the whole system of experiments that makes it possible to distinguish what is really important, to check the soundness of assumptions, to evaluate errors of measurements, etc. Thus not only active elements are results of collective efforts but the thought collective also elaborates "the solid ground of facts".

Only through organized cooperative research, supported by popular knowledge and continuing over several generations, might a uniform picture emerge [1.1, p. 22].

In turn, the thought collective can work efficiently only when it gets suitable encouragement or stimuli from the exoteric circles of science.

People are talking to each other but mutual understanding is never perfect: the listener's associations are more or less different from those that the speaker intended. Circulating from individual to individual and changing their meaning in the process, ideas sometimes merge, sometimes displace each other, sometimes are introduced into other thought styles. That is why concepts are ultimately products not of any individual but of a collective. Finally, the body of knowledge emerges that nobody predicted or intended. Today, we cannot point a single scientist who invented the concepts of force or mass, as they function within classical mechanics and there was no one discoverer of the oxygen theory of combustion or the bacterial theory of disease.

An instructive illustration here is provided by the difference between a scientific paper published in a journal addressed to members of the esoteric circle of a given discipline and the knowledge as presented in textbooks or popular presentations directed towards people from exoteric circles of science. Journal papers are of a provisional and personal character. The results of individual research, selected and modified in the process of interpersonal exchanges and misunderstandings, become more and more impersonal - and obligatory. In this way, textbook knowledge emerges which must be mastered by everyone who tries to enter the esoteric circles of science:

The preliminary signal of resistance has become thought constraint, that determines what cannot be thought in any other way, what is to be neglected or ignored, and where, inversely, redoubled effort of investigation is required. The readiness for directed perception becomes consolidated and assumes a definite form [1.1, p. 123].

When the first textbooks are written - and first thought constraints appear - a discipline passes from the prescientific to the scientific stage.

As the result of sustained collective research carried out under social pressures, a thought style is created. The dominance of a given thought style does not mean that some universal arguments in its favour were found. All arguments are formulated within the very system that they were supposed to justify. We cannot say that a theoretical system is verified or confirmed by facts, because facts arise and develop together with the said system.

Facts also cannot (in spite of what Popper claimed in Logik der Forschung, 1934) disprove a thought style. Fleck mentioned five ways in which a well-developed system resists anomalous facts. (1) For adherents of a thought style some facts are unthinkable, unimaginable, so they do not look for them. (2) When they accidentally come up against facts that could undermine their theories they simply do not notice them. (3) If they even notice them they sometimes keep anomalous facts in secret. (4) If the existence of perplexing facts is admitted, then great efforts are undertaken to explain those anomalies so as to reconcile them with the system. (5) Sometimes scientists see and describe things that do not exist but would have existed if the thought style was right. All arguments for a given system of beliefs are accepted as rational only when the system is already accepted and converted into a thought constraint and then all arguments are in fact superfluous.

But there are scientific revolutions (in Kuhn's sense) that change prevailing thought styles. How does it happen that in spite of all psychological and sociological pressures a group of scientists can create new active ideas and develop them into a new thought style, which takes hold of the minds of the scientific community? There are only a few scattered remarks about it in Fleck's book. For example, we find a comment that, as historical research shows:

Every comprehensive theory passes first through a classical stage, when only those facts are recognized which conform to it exactly, and then through a stage with complications, when the exceptions begin to come forward. [...] In the end, there are often more exceptions than normal instances (1.1, pp. 28-29].

But what makes it possible to notice exceptions and even concentrate our attention on them? The basic stimulus has to originate from outside the results of experiments themselves.

There is an important suggestion in footnote 4 to §4:

For the sociology of science it is important to state that great transformations in thought style, that is, important discoveries, often occur during periods of general social confusion. Such "periods of unrest" reveal the rivalry between opinions, differences between points of view, contradictions, lack of clarity, and the inability directly to perceive a form or meaning. Anew thought style arises from such a situation [1.1, pp. 177-178].

Another important hint can possibly be provided by Fleck's remarks that the passive element can sometimes be transformed, within a different thought style, into an active one. Elements developed within older thought styles, becoming autonomous, could give rise to new systems. Possibly, an important role is played by misunderstandings during the intercollective exchange of ideas. Words change their meanings in many ways and this in turn creates new facts and opens new cognitive possibilities. In this way, an avalanche of transformations can begin, as within scientific systems there are internal connections so that every new fact changes all facts known before.

Probably no more hints about the mechanisms of scientific revolutions can be found in Fleck's book. His remarks on what happens in the result of such transformation are much more important. Fleck opposes the view that old, false statements are replaced by new ones, more true then their predecessors. Before and after the scientific revolution "the same" words have different meanings, so we do not talk more truly about the same facts, objects, etc. but rather we talk in a different way about different things.

There are numerous connections between consecutive thought styles, but they are of a historical rather then of a substantial character. We can trace the developmental paths of particular ideas, but the fact remains that meanings of words in old and new thought style are different, so succeeding thought styles are incommensurable — the Polish counterpart of the famous Kuhn's term can be found in Fleck's paper of 1939, "Nauka a srodowisko" [Science and the Environment] [2.6].

Because a thought style is a directed perception, its change leads to a change of the ways of perceiving the world. Adherents of a new style are no longer interested in some phenomena and other, previously ignored facts become important. The way scientists think about the world changes as well. Sentences that identical in their external form will lead to different conclusions after the revolution. From the points of view of incommensurable thought styles the world is composed of elements of different kinds and possible and actual relations of those elements are different. Different truths will be obvious and various states of affairs will be considered as impossible. Different questions will be asked and different methods will be used to answer them.

As a result, a comparison of the cognitive advantages of incommensurable theoretical systems is not possible. All debates between adherents of different thought styles consist almost entirely of misunderstandings. Members of both parties are talking of different things (although they are usually under an illusion that they are talking about, the same thing). They are applying different methods and criteria of correctness (although they are usually under an illusion that their arguments are universally valid and if their opponents do not want to accept them, then they are either stupid or malicious). In his "Nauka a srodowisko" [2.6], Fleck clainrcd that even such a sentence as "A normal human hand has five fingers" cannot be understood in the same way by all people. In some tribal languages it could not even be formulated: some of them do not contain numbers bigger than three, others define "five" as "a hand" (using such a language, we can only formulate a tautology: "a hand has hand fingers"). There are numerous languages in which there is no general concept of "a finger". Concepts of "normal" are also different. Hence, the above sentence that for us represents an obvious fact, can be meaningless from another point of view.

IV. There are not only gains but also losses involved in the changing of a thought style. We become able to see new facts but at the same time we lose ability to perceive something that was perceived by our predecessors. For ancient thinkers things of which their world was composed had deep, symbolic meaning - those things were related to gods, good and evil, and destiny. Within some thought styles numbers were not only tools of description but were significant in themselves and formed meaningful connections. All those senses disappeared in our times. Contemporary thinkers read old books with the feeling of superiority - for they cannot understand that ancient people had more to say about what was of superior value for them.

The accepted knowledge always seems to be obvious, useful, justified; alien views appear doubtful, useless, unjustified. But contemporary concepts are as they are only due to an accidental historic development. If different active associations were developed in some distant past, then we would have a different, but also a harmonious system of knowledge today. We should remember about it when we evaluate old or alien thought styles. We should also be aware that probably our concepts sooner or later will be replaced by others. Our successors will find our ideas as artificial and unjustified as we find those of our predecessors.

The illusion that science constantly approaches its final goal, namely the true picture of reality, is strengthened by the fact that because of the collective nature of knowledge and mechanisms of its development individual scientists are not aware of the nature of processes in which they take part. They systematically misunderstand past thought styles. Even scientists own memories are not reliable. Fleck sums up the story of the discovery of the Wassermann reaction as follows:

From false assumptions and irreproducible initial experiments an important discovery has resulted after many errors and detours. The principal actors of the drama cannot tell us how it happened, for they rationalize and idealize the development. Some among the eyewitnesses talk about a lucky accident, and the well-disposed about the intuition of a genius. It is quite clear that the claims of both parties are of no scientific value [1.1, p. 76].

"In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature" [1.1, p. 35]. But such remarks refer to active associations only and not to passive associations discovered in the process of applying active ones that are objectively true or false within the system. As Fleck emphasizes, truth is neither "relative" nor "subjective",

It is always, or almost always, completely determined by 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 [1.1, p. 100].

V. It is of course meaningless to ask whether a thought style as a whole is in agreement with reality. It would be better if we completely avoided using the word "reality", although the grammar of our language that requires the occurrence of a subject in a sentence forces us to do so, claimed Fleck in his paper "Nauka a srodowisko". In "Problemy naukoznawstwa" [Problems of the Science of Science] [2.7] after criticizing the principle of the unity of science, he expressed an extreme attitude: no scientific discipline contains the objective picture of the world in the sense of one-to-one semantic mapping of it and it does not even contain any fragment of such a picture. If it contained it, there would exist a constant, unchanging part of science, and scientific knowledge would grow simply by the adding of new information, whereas historical research shows that it constantly changes as a whole.

In spite of the above. Fleck emphasized the uniqueness of both scientific thought styles and scientific thought collectives; although in his opinion. differences between science and philosophy, art or religion are only of quantitative, and not of qualitative, nature.

Scientific thought styles are distinguished by the larger number of passive elements relative to the number of active ones. There are passive elements in every thought style, even in myths or fairy-tales. However, internal connections within mythical systems are more detached and that is why the world appears to the adherents of such thought styles as unstable and full of miracles. In contrast, scientific thought styles are characterized by a relatively large degree of internal connections, and this leads to the belief that there is objective reality that exists independently of our thoughts, feelings and wishes.

The peculiarity of scientific thought collectives consists mainly in their relatively democratic character. All scientists have equal rights to express their opinions, and arguments are never evaluated on the basis of the position of their author within the scientific community. Besides, scientists, contrary to peremptory and dogmatic priests, are in partnership with members of exoteric circles. Instead of instructing them, scientists try to gain laymen's recognition by presenting their achievements in a popular form in order to make them available to everyone.

We can also talk of emotions typical of scientific investigations (the concept of thinking free of emotion is meaningless for Fleck), of the specific intellectual mood of modern science. The mood is intimately connected with the structure of scientific thought collectives. "It is expressed as a common reverence for an ideal - the ideal of objective truth, clarity, and accuracy" [1.1, p. 142]. "All research workers [...] in the service of the common ideal, must equally withdraw their own individuality into the shadows, as it were" [1.1, p. 144].

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Books:

1. (1935). Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einfiihrung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Basel: Bruno Schwabeund Co.; English ed. by T.T. Tren, R.K. Meiton, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979.

2. Papers:

1. (1927). 0 niektórych swoistych cechach myślenia lekarskiego [On Some Specific Features of the Medical Way of Thinking], Archiwum Historii i Filozofii Medycyny oraz. Historii Nauk Przyrodniczych 6, 55-64; English translation in: R.S. Cohen, T. Schnelle (Eds.). Cognition and Fact — Materials on Ludwik Fleck. Dordrecht: Reidel 1986,39-46.

2. (1929). Zur Krise der "Wirklichkeit". Die Naturwissenschaften 17, 425-430; English translation in: R.S. Cohen, T. Schnelle (Eds.), op. cit., 47-58.

3. (1935). 0 obserwacji naukowej i postrzeganiu w ogóle [On Scientific Observation and Perception in General]. Przeglqd Filozoficzny 38, 57-76; English translation in: R.S. Cohen, T. Schnelle (Eds.), op. cit., 59-78.

4. (1935). Zur Frage der Grundlagen der medizinischen Erkenntnis. Klinische Wochenschrift 14, 1255-1259.

5. (1936). Zagadnienie teorii poznawania [The Problem of Epistemology]. Przeglqd Filozoficzny 39, 3-37; English translation in: R.S. Cohen, T. Schnelle (Eds.), op. cit., 79-112.

6. (1939). Nauka a środowisko. Odpowiedź na uwagi Tadeusza Bilikiewicza [Science and the Environment. An Answer to Tadeusz Bilikiewicz's Remarks]. Przeglqd Współczesny 18, 8, 149-156; 9, 168-174.

7. (1946). Problemy naukoznawstwa [Problems of the Science of Science]. Zycie Nauki. Miesięcznik Naukoznawczy 1, 322-336; English translation in: R.S. Cohen, T. Schnelle (Eds.), op. cit., 113-128.

8. (1947). Patrzeć, widzieć, wiedzieć [To Look, to See, to Know]. Problemy 2, 74-84; English translation in: R.S. Cohen, T. Schnelle (Eds.), op. cit., 129-152.

9. (1986). Crisis in Science. Towards a Free and More Human Science. Previously unpublished manuscript, Ness-Ziona 1960; in: R.S. Cohen, T. Schnelle (Eds.), op.cit., 153-158.