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mburnamfink 's review for:
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
by Ludwik Fleck
No matter what you do in life, you will never be as awesome as Ludwik Fleck. A Jewish Polish doctor most active in the interwar years, Fleck published 120 medical articles in 6 languages, wrote a proto-STS tract, invented a typhus vaccine while imprisoned in the ghetto by the Nazis, survived Auschwitz, testified against Mengele and co at the Nuremburg trials, and finally fled Soviet occupied Europe to Israel in 1957. They were a different breed then.
Fleck traces syphilis from the 16th century to the 20th century, from a moral scourge to one of many genital ulcerating diseases, to a bacteria, to the contemporary Wasserman antibody test. But syphilis merely serves as the primary example for a much grander project in what Fleck terms comparative epistemology, as he explains how scientific knowledge work. Fleck develops a detailed theory around 'thought collectives' and 'thought styles', the collective work that determines what it regarded as scientifically valid, the circulation of knowledge, and the definition of relevant problems and details.
It's a clear precursor to Kuhn and Foucault, in terms of genealogical approaches to understanding previous scientific theories as true in their time, not as false ideas to discarded in the Whiggish march to absolute truth. Fleck, however, does not share Kuhn's belief in incommensurability, choosing instead a more continuous view of scientific history. The approach to communities of individuals, techniques, tools, tactic knowledge, and norms, prefigures Bruno Latour's lab ethnography and the social constructivist turn.
However, this is a strange, strange book, the scholarly equivalent of a coelacanth. It's not much formally cited (I don't think I've ever seen it in a contemporary paper). Later authors took the form of Fleck's ideas, while discarding his terminology. The medical details that Fleck uses to support his claims are often hard to follow. While the assertions sparkle ("A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking"), they're embedded in a glutinous mass of anti-Vienna school sociology. I can't really say that anybody should read this book, but if they'll do, they'll be a better person.
Fleck traces syphilis from the 16th century to the 20th century, from a moral scourge to one of many genital ulcerating diseases, to a bacteria, to the contemporary Wasserman antibody test. But syphilis merely serves as the primary example for a much grander project in what Fleck terms comparative epistemology, as he explains how scientific knowledge work. Fleck develops a detailed theory around 'thought collectives' and 'thought styles', the collective work that determines what it regarded as scientifically valid, the circulation of knowledge, and the definition of relevant problems and details.
It's a clear precursor to Kuhn and Foucault, in terms of genealogical approaches to understanding previous scientific theories as true in their time, not as false ideas to discarded in the Whiggish march to absolute truth. Fleck, however, does not share Kuhn's belief in incommensurability, choosing instead a more continuous view of scientific history. The approach to communities of individuals, techniques, tools, tactic knowledge, and norms, prefigures Bruno Latour's lab ethnography and the social constructivist turn.
However, this is a strange, strange book, the scholarly equivalent of a coelacanth. It's not much formally cited (I don't think I've ever seen it in a contemporary paper). Later authors took the form of Fleck's ideas, while discarding his terminology. The medical details that Fleck uses to support his claims are often hard to follow. While the assertions sparkle ("A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking"), they're embedded in a glutinous mass of anti-Vienna school sociology. I can't really say that anybody should read this book, but if they'll do, they'll be a better person.