FLECK AND THE SOCIAL CONSTITUTION

OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY

** work in progress: please do not circulate or cite **

Melinda B. Fagan
Department of Philosophy
Rice University, MS 14
P.O. Box 1892
Houston, Texas 77251-1892

Phone: 713 348-2298

Fax: 713 348-5847
mbf2@rice.edu

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Sociology of thinking is a young science unappreciated by scientists. It is much better known and
misused by politicians, and the whole of mankind loses the more by it.
- Ludwik Fleck, 1947

Abstract

Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thought styles has been hailed as a pioneer of constructivist science

studies and sociology of scientific knowledge. But this consensus ignores an important feature of

Fleck’s epistemology. At the core of his account is the ideal of “objective truth, clarity, and

accuracy.” This paper makes three related arguments concerning Fleck’s view of the ideal of

scientific objectivity. The first is interpretative: I present Fleck’s account of modern natural

science, and locate scientific objectivity within it. Second, I use this interpretation to improve

upon reflexive accounts of Fleck’s theory of thought-styles, building on work by Löwy and

others to account for the origin and development of his innovative ideas. Finally, I draw on this

developmental account of scientific objectivity to respond to a persistent critique of Fleck’s

epistemological stance. I conclude by suggesting a modification of Fleck’s view that preserves

its commitment to both scientific objectivity and to integration of sociology, history and

philosophy of science.

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1. Introduction

Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961) has been called “a Gregor Mendel of the history and philosophy of

science;” more precisely, of a “sociologically-minded constructivist approach” to HPS.1 Largely

ignored by philosophers of science and medicine in the 1930s, Fleck was hailed in the 1980s as a

pioneer of constructivist science studies.2 But this characterization ignores an important feature

of Fleck’s epistemology. At the core of his socio-historical account is the ideal of “objective

truth, clarity, and accuracy” - a conception of scientific objectivity of the sort his alleged

successors eschew (1979/35, 142). In this paper, I make three related arguments concerning

Fleck’s conception of scientific objectivity. The first is interpretative: the ideal of scientific

objectivity has a central place in Fleck’s social epistemology of science (§2). I first note the

main points of Fleck’s theory of thought-styles, then examine his account of the thought style of

modern science and the “distinctive mood” that puts it into effect. The crux and culmination of

Fleck’s epistemology is his explication of the ideal of scientific objectivity. The second

argument applies this result to recent work in science studies. Attending to Fleck’s account of

scientific objectivity, specifically its integration of scientific knowledge and social structure,

yields a more satisfactory reflexive explanation of the origin and development of his theory (§3).

This result builds on recent work by Löwy (1990, 2000, 2004) and others emphasizing the

importance of Fleck’s biomedical practice for the development of his epistemology. Third, I

address a persistent objection to Fleck’s epistemological stance in light of his conception of

scientific objectivity (§4). Briefly, Fleck’s social epistemology of science does not dismiss or

deflate scientific objectivity, but is intended to exemplify and explicate this epistemic ideal. The

theory of thought styles is a contribution to modern science, legitimized and vindicated by

satisfaction of its norms of scientific objectivity. This self-conscious commitment to scientific

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objectivity distinguishes Fleck’s view from many other versions of social constructivism and

defuses objections that Fleck’s epistemological stance is incoherent or self-undermining, his

norms of scientific objectivity raise problems of their own. I conclude by suggesting a way to

modify and renew Fleck’s social epistemology so as to preserve its commitment to both

scientific objectivity and the interaction of sociology, history and philosophy of science (§5).

2. Objectivity in Fleck’s theory of thought-styles

2.1 Epistemology of thought-styles: an overview

Fleck’s epistemology, an amalgam of philosophy, history and sociology, anticipated the

naturalizing and historicizing tendencies in contemporary philosophy of science. Fleck focused

on inquiry, acquisition of new knowledge, which he conceived as a tripartite historical process

involving an inquiring subject, an object to be known, and background knowledge constraining

and connecting the two. The last of these being ineliminable, the course of inquiry cannot be

reduced to logic, ‘directly given’ experience or any combination thereof. There is, accordingly,

no Cartesian starting point for inquiry, only continuation of work-in-progress. All our epistemic

efforts are conditioned by a “previously accumulated store of knowledge.”3 This epistemic

background for inquiry is inherently social, in two ways. First, knowledge is generated by

communicative interactions among epistemic agents; there is, so to speak, no ‘frictionless’

exchange of information among individual inquirers. Fleck’s epistemology is in this sense

essentially interactive. Second, background knowledge is organized at the collective level into a

harmonious thought-style that directs the perception, inferences and creative thought of members

of a group engaged in inquiry (a thought-collective). As will be seen, the relation between these

two aspects of sociality is central to Fleck’s epistemology.

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 Because of the ineliminable role of thought-styles in inquiry, Fleck argues, we cannot

understand actual science in terms of observations or theories that directly correspond to mind-

independent reality. Instead, knowledge is “by and large to be evaluated as a free creation of

culture” mediated by social interactions among members of a community: “We look with our

own eyes, but we see with the eyes of a collective body.”4 Fleck’s epistemology is both social

and developmental: in the process of inquiry, new facts emerge gradually as passive ‘resistances’

to active epistemic efforts constrained by a specific thought-style. Development of facts occurs

in three stages: “[a]t first there is a signal of resistance in the chaotic initial thinking, then a

definite thought constraint, and finally a form to be directly perceived.”5 Thought-styles

‘determine the facts,’ in the sense that the latter impress themselves upon us as inescapable

features of the world only in the context of mutually-supporting ideas and values that constitute a

thought-style. Facts cannot be evaluated or translated across thought-styles, since such

‘exchange’ requires communicative interaction, which generates new background knowledge

and so alters the fact in question.6 So truth or falsity of a statement (whether it describes fact or

artifact) is relative to a thought-style. Moreover, thought-styles are in continuous flux,

responding to contingent changes in communicative interactions among members of a thought-

collective. Facts wax and wane with their attendant thought-styles.

This socio-historical epistemology has no place for absolute dualisms of good/bad

thinking or true/false statements. Fleck describes such simplistic normative dichotomies as

“obsolete,” and argues that detaching scientific statements from their ‘socio-cogitative’ stylistic

contexts to evaluate them as true or false is “an empty play on words or an epistemology of the

imagination.”7 Instead, he proposes a general comparative study of diverse thought-styles, to

reveal the specific features of each, and so account for the historical phenomena of facts in terms

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of the thought-styles of particular thought-collectives. Fleck envisaged this “comparative

epistemology” as an interdisciplinary project aimed at identifying lawlike relations among

“socio-cogitative forces” and allowing “uniform comparison” of all types of thinking:

“primitive, archaic, naïve and psychotic,” within “any group no matter how it is constituted… a

whole nation, a class,” etc. 8 The basic idea is to bring out, through comparison and contrast, the

assumptions that operate within a thought-collective to make particular facts seem evidently true:

“the naturalism of every epoch consists in the stressing of features such that they may be

consistent with the style of a given epoch and given society, but invisible to its members.”9

2.2 The thought-style of modern science

It is important to note that Fleck’s epistemology is not communitarian or collectivist, in the sense

that the group is epistemically primary. It is, rather, a ‘multi-level’ view, in which the basic

explanatory structure is mutual support or co-dependence. Thought-styles impinge on members

of a thought-collective via “readiness for directed perception and assimilation.” ‘Readiness’ is

produced by the “collective mood,” which is in turn produced by epistemic interactions among

diverse individuals.10 Interacting epistemic agents, “from a common understanding and mutual

misunderstanding,” jointly produce a distinctive collective mood that feeds back on the agents’

inquiries. The constraining collective and interacting individuals are interdependent; their mutual

support drives inquiry within a thought-style. Thought-collectives have an internal interactive

structure, being composed of an esoteric circle of experts/specialists, and an exoteric circle of

non-experts.11

The esoteric circle of modern science is further subdivided into ‘specialists’ and ‘general’

experts (see Figure 1, Table 1).12 Each circle exhibits a characteristic means of epistemic

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interaction; that is, a distinctive literary form used to communicate within it. Specialists

communicate with one another in journal articles; general experts use handbooks or

vademecums; and the educated general public consumes books of ‘popular science.’ Fleck’s

attention to these ‘literary technologies’ does anticipate late-20th century textual analysis and

studies of rhetoric. But in his interactive social epistemology, these literary forms have

additional epistemic significance. They are the media of epistemic interaction within each circle

of the thought-collective of modern science. These distinctive interactions produce the tripartite

social structure of modern science. Since communicative interactions are epistemically

transformative, the ‘traffic’ in scientific knowledge within each circle yields distinctive results.

Specialists in the “vanguard” of inquiry make provisional, personal, and fragmentary claims in

journal articles. Handbooks for general experts deal in organized, coherent systems of scientific

facts. And popular science presents simple, vivid, certainties about the way things are, with all

subtleties and qualifications removed.

The three circles are linked in single thought-collective by a closed ‘loop’ of epistemic

dependence relations. Specialists detect tentative (often inconsistent) “signals of resistance,”

which general experts select and modify into systems of facts. The exoteric public, by taking

these up, transforms facts into simple, certain, obvious truths - the reality we live in. The circle

closes, because experts all work perforce with a background of popular science, transmitted by

education. But scientific knowledge is ‘directed outward’ - its movement is ‘centrifugal.’

Specialized experts strive for their work to be accepted as fact by general experts, and esoteric

scientists strive for public recognition of their results as reality. The ideal of modern science as a

whole reflects the ‘direction’ of scientists’ epistemic efforts. It is idealized popular science:

simple, vivid, certain knowledge of reality. The balance of epistemic power, on Fleck’s view,

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rests with the exoteric circle. In this sense, science is “fundamentally democratic.”13 The

tripartite thought-collective of modern science is woven together by a cycle of mutually-

dependent epistemic interactions, such that scientific facts develop ‘outward’ from their tentative

point of origin in creative research, toward the reality presented in popular science.

[FIGURE 1]

[TABLE 1]

2.3 The end of Fleck’s Development: scientific objectivity14

Fleck’s account of the thought-style of modern science is grounded mainly on a detailed

historical case study of the concept of syphilis and the development of the Wassermann reaction

as a serological test for this disease.15 The study is presented in his 1935 monograph Entstehung

und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (Genesis and Development of a Scientific

Fact), which alternates between historical epistemological discussion.16 The first chapter

describes the history of concept of syphilis, noting its persistent association with the idea of ‘bad

blood,’17 and the second draws from this case history the lesson that scientific facts are enmeshed

in culture, introducing the key concepts of thought-style and thought-collective. The latter two

chapters are similarly related, but focus on the 20th century. Chapter Three describes the history

of the Wassermann reaction, and Chapter Four presents the general theory of thought-styles and

thought-collectives, including discussion of individuals’ “observation, experiment, experience”

and “characteristics of the thought collective of modern science.” The monograph concludes

with a summary of Fleck’s main points:

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 We have defined thought style as the readiness for directed perception and
appropriate assimilation of what has been perceived. We have already mentioned
the particular mood which produces this readiness for any particular thought style.
An exhaustive investigation of thought styles cannot be assigned to this book, for
it would take up the working capacity of a lifetime. There is but one element of
the thought-style of modern science that ought to be discussed, namely the
specific intellectual mood of modern scientific thinking, especially in the natural
sciences. This mood stands in direct relation to the specific structure of the
thought collective of science as has already been described.18

After reprising the essentials of his theory, and gesturing at the enormous canvas for

future work it opens up, Fleck goes on to discuss “the specific intellectual mood of modern

scientific thinking” and its “direct relation to the specific structure of the thought collective of

science.” The latter is as described above (§2.2). The direction relation of this structure to the

“intellectual mood of modern scientific thinking” is as follows.19 The mood is “expressed as a

common reverence for an ideal – the ideal of objective truth, clarity, and accuracy” (142, italics

in original). Fleck goes on to describe this “reverence” in terms that might be taken to suggest

that he does not share it: “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.” This sounds just the sort of idealized

epistemology Fleck decries elsewhere, and the quasi-religious tone reinforces this impression.

But, importantly, Fleck is not describing devotion to scientific knowledge or loyalty oaths to

facts, but the values that motivate scientists to continue their work - values he shared, as

evidenced by his own continuation of research under increasingly harsh (later desperate)

conditions: “No one already initiated would claim that scientific thinking is devoid of feeling.”

The point he strains to make here is that the thought-collective of modern science does have a

distinctive animating ‘mood,’ in preparation for the explanation of its relation to the structure of

modern science.

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 The collective ideal of “objective truth, clarity, and accuracy” gets its specific

characteristics from the exoteric circle of popular science, reflecting the ‘directed’ movement of

knowledge through the tripartite social structure of the scientific thought collective. This is

rather abstract, and Fleck goes on to explain how the mood of modern science is “put into effect”

by the scientists of the thought-collective. He cites three factors. First, each scientist is

obligated to “withdraw his or her own individuality to the background” in the democratic

community of research, to reduce the personal aspects of inquiry and its results. Second, and

concomitant with the withdrawal of the personal, scientists tend to objectivize (reify) the results

of their inquiries, to take them as corresponding directly to reality. And finally, there is

“reverence for number and form;” the aim of a complete formal system of “maximal

information” and belief in scientific progress towards this goal.20 These three factors are norms

of scientific objectivity. Together, the obligation of impersonality, tendency to reify results, and

aim of a complete formal system of maximal information constrain epistemic interactions within

the thought-collective of modern science. By conforming to these norms, scientific inquirers

“direct” the development of facts ‘outward,’ from esoteric specialists to the exoteric public. The

ideal of scientific objectivity (truth, clarity, accuracy) is thus socially constituted - it is specified

by epistemic interactions among members of the thought-collective of modern science, in

accordance with these norms. The ideal of scientific objectivity is the focus of the specific mood

of modern science, which stands in a direct relation of mutual support and co-dependence with

the social epistemic structure of modern science - emerging from, and in turn constraining, the

epistemic interactions that characterize modern science in its three parts.

3. Development of Fleck’s social epistemology: reflexive explanation

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3.1 Reception and responses

Fleck’s socio-historical epistemology of science was articulated in ten essays and one

monograph, with publication concentrated between 1934 and 1936 (see Table 2).21 Later essays

expanded on, but did not essentially change, the theory presented in the monograph, Fleck’s

best-known work.22 His theory of thought-styles made very little philosophical impact, though

the monograph was reviewed in a dozen medical journals, and eight of general cultural interest.23

The lack of response is striking, particularly since Polish Schools of Philosophy of Medicine and

Philosophy of Science were thriving at the time, and Fleck participated in discussion circles

affiliated with the former and lived in Lwów, a center for the latter.24 But apart from a favorable

review by logician and artist Leon Chwistek in the cultural journal Pion (for a general audience,

1936), a footnote in Reichenbach’s Experience and Prediction (1938), and two critical responses

objecting to his (alleged) epistemic relativism (Dambska 1937, Bilikiewicz 1939), Fleck’s theory

seems to have gone unnoticed by philosophers of science and medicine of his own day, and even

his own city.25

[TABLE 2]

Recent commentators have offered several explanations for the lack of response. In the

case of the Lwów-Warsaw School of philosophy of science, Wolniewicz (1986) and Giedymin

(1986) argue persuasively that what put Fleck beyond the pale was not the issue of

epistemological relativism, but his sociological rather than logical approach.26 The Lwów-

Warsaw School of Philosophy of Science grew out of a long tradition in Polish philosophy of

empiricism, enthusiasm for science, and antipathy to speculative metaphysics (‘irrationalism’).27

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The School was founded in the late-19th century by Kazimierz Twardowski, a student of

Brentano’s, who at first attempted to export the latter’s project of descriptive psychology from

Vienna to Lwów. But Husserl and Frege’s critiques of psychologism spurred him to develop a

non-psychologistic account of logic, mathematics and the humanities.28 Twardowski did not

transmit many philosophical theses to his students, but his anti-systematic approach and

standards of precision and clarity in formulating and resolving philosophical problems were

basic commitments of the Lwów-Warsaw School, and his anti-psychologism was influential.

The celebrated “logistic” of the Polish School was promulgated by Lukasiewicz, who worked on

multi-valued logics and emphasized the role of creative, psychological elements in science.

Though Fleck was aware of Lukasiewicz’ work, his views were closest to Ajdukiewicz’ “radical

conventionalism:”

the “guiding principle [of which] is that the scientific image of the world is
conventional down to minute details, and can be changed through appropriate
changes in the conceptual apparatus (which is constituted by the meanings of
words in a given language), and that each of those scientific images of the world
has equal rights to claim recognition as the “real” image.29

Schnelle (1986b), noting these similarities and biographical points of contact, argues that Fleck’s

epistemology developed in response to questions raised about the systematic grounding of truth,

knowledge and reality by the relativistic triumvirate of Lwów philosophers of science

(Twardowski, Ajdukiewicz and Chwistek). On this interpretation, Fleck took over and adapted

the problems and fundamental assumptions of these three predecessors, transforming them into a

socio-historical framework based on a superficial acquaintance with European sociology of

knowledge. But this paints Fleck as concerned with “the foundation of reality, knowledge and

truth” (235), despite his explicit rejection of epistemological foundations and eschewal of

metaphysics. It also fails to explain his distinctively social epistemology (§2.2).

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 Giedymin (1986), more plausibly, inverts this argument to explain why the Lwów-

Warsaw school saw no need to respond to Fleck: their ‘conventionalist wing’ (including

Lukasiewicz and Ajdukiewicz) anticipated Fleck’s radical epistemological claims (211-212). So

his epistemology was not new, but reprises earlier conventionalist claims - and did so, moreover,

in a way that neglected logic and abstract models, eschewing precision and rigor for wooly

sociological terms that remain undefined. By the lights of the Polish School, Fleck’s

epistemology was vague, psychologistic and derivative; with one exception, they saw no need to

respond.30

Fleck’s epistemology was also unacceptable, for quite different reasons, to Polish

historians and philosophers of medicine of the 1920s and 1930s. The Polish School of

Philosophy of Medicine consisted of three generations of Polish physicians, and was

distinguished by concern with the relation between medical theory and practice, epitomized by

the question ‘is medicine an art or a science?’31 Its founder, Tytus Chalubinski, affirmed the

centrality of clinical practice (rather than scientific textbook classifications of disease) and in

1874 proposed a method for understanding and advancing therapy. The second generation

(Biernacki, Bieganski, Kramsztyk) was active around the turn of the 20th century, during the

heyday of ‘scientific medicine,’ and wrote texts dealing with the logic and limits of medical

knowledge as well as its practical aspects. Most members of the School at that time emphasized

the difference between scientific knowledge (typified by laws of physics and chemistry) and

clinical practice (organized around the goal of assisting patients), and the inadequacy

(incompleteness) of medicine reduced to the former. The first steps toward institutionalization

were taken when Kramsztyk, a successful ophthalmologist, founded and edited the journal

Medical Critique (1897-1908). It became fully institutionalized, and quite influential, in its third

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(and final) generation, the interwar period of Polish independence (1918-1939), when the

country’s universities and medical curricula were reconstructed after more than a century of

partition and occupation. Members of the School established chairs in history and philosophy of

medicine, added historical requirements for medical degrees, and founded the journal Archives of

History and Philosophy of Medicine (1924-1938). However, though its leaders (Nusbaum,

Wrzosek, Trzebinski, Szumonski, Bilikiewicz) emphasized continuity with the previous

generation, the School gradually ceased to focus on the relation between medical theory and

practice and dispensed with epistemological critique, focusing instead on history of medicine.

By the 1930s, Fleck’s views made a poor fit with the aims and methods of Polish philosophy of

medicine, and were generally rejected by that institutionalized community.32

Bilikiewicz’ (1939) critique of Fleck’s alleged relativism reveals the extent of the

School’s disengagement with the latter’s socio-historical approach:

The consequence of such an approach is an inability to establish a general

criterion of truth from the standpoint of classical theories of cognition and
acceptance of truth merely as a current stage of modifications in thought-style.
Thus, unquestionable cognitive relativism follows, which attributes equal
importance to various images of reality arising from different thought-styles, even
if these images are inconsistent.33

The first sentence is correct - though, as Fleck noted in his reply (1990/39b), since no theory of

cognition or inquiry establishes a general criterion of truth, the inability of his theory to do so is

not a problem. (Fleck’s theory is distinctive not in the ability, but in acknowledging it.) But, as

Fleck also noted in reply, cognitive relativism does not follow. Accepting truth as the current

stage of thought-style development does not somehow transport one to an imagined neutral

stance outside history, from which all accounts of the world have equal importance. Fleck’s

basic point is that there is no neutral standard for ‘measuring truth’ - or importance - across

thought styles. His epistemology aimed to undermine fanatical intolerance and “absolute

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propaganda” by identifying and explaining different, even inconsistent, claims in terms of

changes in thought-style.34 Bilikiewicz insists on “objective reality” and the “essence of

science” independent of mental constructions (of individual or collective provenance) and

interprets Fleck as studying (social aspects of) cognitive conditions of the mind. History of

science and medicine, in contrast, “describes the effect of the environment on the content of

science,” bypassing the inquirers and their conditions to engage directly with these objects and

relations (1990/39, 258). From this standpoint, Fleck appears to endorse a form of

transcendental idealism, in which thought makes the world, the gap between Nature and Culture

disappears, and objective reality is socially constructed. But this characterization is premised on

the rejection of one of Fleck’s core claims: that any philosophical ‘shortcut’ to assessing science

and its context bypassing the social conditioning of inquirers is wholly imaginary. Fleck rightly

rejected this criticism (though without effect).

3.2 Genesis and development of the theory of thought styles

If Fleck’s core idea, denial of the distinction between sociality and epistemology, was

unacceptable to both Polish Schools of his day, how did it originate and develop? Though his

social epistemology exhibits some consonance with American pragmatism and sociology of

knowledge, Fleck seems to have been unaware of the former and only superficially acquainted

with the latter.35 Ilana Löwy (1986, 1990, 2000) has examined the origins of Fleck’s ideas in

detail, and argues that they are to be found in the previous generation of the Polish School of

Philosophy of Medicine, and in Fleck’s own biomedical practice. But this plausible socio-

historical explanation of Fleck’s epistemology is weakened by its failure to account for its most

distinctive feature – the very one that alienated Fleck from the Schools of his day. This is the

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merging of sociology and epistemology. I offer a friendly amendment to Löwy’s account, which

remedies this defect.

As noted above (§3.1), Polish philosophy of medicine in the late-19th and early-20th

century focused on the relation between medical theory and practice. Prominent members of the

School affirmed the constructedness of diseases and classifications, the philosophical relevance

of immunology and hematology, biases in observation and reports of facts throughout the history

of medicine, and historical relativism concerning medical truth and influences of ideology.

Other themes shared with Fleck included the particularity and specificity of each clinical case

(making inference from general or statistical laws difficult or at best indirect), changes in

medical knowledge over time (decoupling progress in understanding and treatment), and the

importance of social and psychological factors in medicine. Most suggestively, Kramsztyk’s

1898 article ‘A Clinical Fact,’ which appeared in his Medical Journal, distinguished descriptive

facts (which state that something exists) from relational (explanatory, perceptual) facts, and

noted both that background (often technical) knowledge required to observe new facts, and that

we are unavoidably ‘partial’ in making such observations. Other articles by Kramsztyk discuss

the importance of history in understanding medical knowledge (and science more generally), and

the interdependence of scientific (‘rational’) and practical activities in producing medical

knowledge. So there is considerable overlap with Fleck’s epistemological views and concerns.

There are, to be sure, important differences: Kramsztyk allows for ‘material progress in science’

through the ‘economization’ of information by explanatory/lawlike connection, and views

‘simple facts’ of physics and chemistry as foundational, in contrast with ‘easily bent’ clinical

facts concerning complex phenomena. But the similarities are very striking. Moreover, it is very

likely that Fleck read works by Bieganski, Kramsztyk and Trzebinski which discussed these

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ideas (though he does not refer to them). Fleck’s first philosophical paper was on ‘the medical

way of thinking,’ presented to the Society of Amateurs of History of Medicine of Lwów (April

1926), which was affiliated with the contemporary incarnation of the School. It would be

peculiar indeed, given his historical interests and wide-ranging reading, if Fleck were unaware of

earlier work by the same School. So Löwy’s argument is persuasive, that the previous

generation of the Polish School of Philosophy of Medicine influenced the development of

Fleck’s epistemology.

However, this continuity with the preceding generation does not account for Fleck’s

distinctively social epistemology, nor his conception of scientific objectivity (§§2.2-2.3). The

social and epistemic distinctions and relations of dependence that structure the thought-style of

modern science (and so constitute objectivity for Fleck) have no obvious counterpart in Polish

philosophy of medicine.36 This is not surprising, since the Polish School was responding to an

epistemological tension that did not concern Fleck: the vexed difference between the ‘art’ of

clinical practice and ‘genuine science.’ Fleck was never a clinician, and relegated clinical

practice to the exoteric circle of modern science. The tension that drove his epistemology was

between “true, living, natural science” and its “official, ideal image” (or the “religion” of the

researcher, contrasted with the practice of his life and work).37 Neither his problematic nor his

sociological solution derives from philosophy of medicine.

A more promising source for Fleck’s core idea is his own biomedical practice. Löwy’s

detailed studies do not neglect this. But their emphasis on Fleck’s “outsider status” and the

content of his preferred theories is, I think, somewhat misplaced.38 Löwy argues that Fleck’s

“vision of science and his attitude toward nature both deriv[e] from his professional experience”

in immunology and microbiology, particularly his outsider status as a non-academic scientist,

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performing routine analysis in public health laboratories.39 As a characterization of Fleck’s

scientific views, this seems perfectly accurate. Fleck’s theoretical ideas on microbiology and

immunology derived from his training as a medical student and lab assistant, and by the time he

formulated his epistemology, these were far from the cutting edge. Notably, Fleck rejected a

number of dominant immunological and bacteriological theories of his day, including the

etiological theory of disease, fixity of bacterial species, and the specificity (indeed, the chemical

reality) of antibody. He favored, instead, a holistic account of disease as host-pathogen

interaction in an environmental context, including the full complexity of immune phenomena

over an organism’s life and across populations. Today views of this sort have many supporters,

but in the 1930s, when reductive immunochemistry was ascendant, Fleck’s ideas seemed out-

dated (albeit consistent with available data).40 Löwy (and Freudenthal) connect Fleck’s minority

scientific views with his ambiguous place in science’s social hierarchy; he was “a scientist by

vocation, but (only) a clinical laboratory worker by occupation.”41 According to their view,

barred from academic research and engagement with the newest theories and methods, Fleck was

spurred to develop an epistemology that legitimated his own marginal scientific position and

ideas. In this way, his innovative views in both science and philosophy stem from his ‘outsider

status.’ But this explanation begs the question: why did Fleck ‘socialize epistemology?’ Löwy

and Freudenthal explain Fleck’s social epistemology as an (unsuccessful) attempt to legitimize

both his social and his scientific positions. But his distinctive innovation was to see the two

issues as related in the first place. And this remains mysterious, on Löwy’s (and Freudenthal’s)

account. Why did Fleck develop a social epistemology of science?42

I propose a different practice-based explanation: Fleck’s distinctive social epistemology

originated in his experience as a biomedical researcher moving through the social structure of

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science. This has several advantages over existing alternatives. First, it is more in keeping with

Fleck’s own ideas, focusing on Fleck’s own ‘developmental history’ in science rather than the

content of the theories he endorsed. Second, it explains Fleck’s most innovative epistemological

move: the interdependence of social structure and epistemic norms in science. Finally, it points

to a new understanding of Fleck’s work and its relevance for science studies today. The first two

advantages are discussed below; the last in §4.

3.3 Social movement within modern science

Throughout his 40-year career Fleck pursued immunological inquiries from a variety of social

locations. For my purposes the key period is from the early 1920s to 1934, when he was

formulating his social epistemology.43 During this interval, Fleck experienced a number of

transitions that impacted his research in bacteriology and immunology (Table 3). His innovative

social epistemology originated in these formative movements, which impressed upon him the

importance of social interactions in scientific inquiry.

[TABLE 3]

Fleck was born and educated in Lwów, then in southeastern Poland (now in Ukraine).44

When he began studying medicine at Jan Kazimierz University, Poland was partitioned between

Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary. Lwów was in the latter’s territory (Galicia), and from the

late 19th century enjoyed considerable autonomy, with strong cultural ties to Vienna. When

Fleck graduated in 1920, Poland was an independent country, eager to reform medical education

and practice, along with its other institutions. Fleck’s epistemology developed during the two

19
decades of Polish Independence (1918-1939).45 Though his degree fitted him for general clinical

practice, upon graduating Fleck became an assistant to a prominent bacteriologist, Rudolf Weigl,

whose laboratory in Przmysl focused on typhus (spotted fever). Fleck’s first scientific transition,

then, was from medical student in an occupied province, to research assistant in a highly

specialized and prestigious research laboratory. The move highlighted the contrast between the

‘official image of science’ taught to university students, and actual research practice.

Under Weigl, Fleck learned serological methods for culturing and diagnosing typhus, and

other techniques of medical microbiology, which emphasized serotherapy and vaccination.46 The

pathogens associated with typhus were small bacteria (Rickettsiae) that, like viruses, propagated

within infected cells. Typhus serology thus involved more than immunochemical reactions

between serum and antigen. Fleck’s views on bacterial variability (in virulence and morphology)

and antibody specificity were deeply influenced by Weigl’s theories as well as his own

laboratory experience. Alongside the well-known theoretical dispute regarding humoral and

cellular immunity was a related tension between reductive, quantitative immunochemistry and

more holistic diagnostic description. After early clinical successes by Koch, von Behring and

Pasteur, clinical serology and bacteriology dwindled in prestige and ambition as quantitative, in

vitro immunochemistry took precedence. By the 1920s, the gap between clinical and chemical

immunology had widened to the point that practitioners could not appreciate one another’s goals,

methods or basic assumptions. Fleck’s training in medicine and serology placed him firmly in

the clinical camp.

Weigl’s was a prestigious laboratory, with an international reputation in research on

typhus - Fleckfieber in German. It is highly unlikely that Fleck’s choice of research topic was

whimsically nominal or a last resort. Typhus was a significant public health concern in Eastern

20
Europe at the time, its epidemics tracking the paths of war and famines; in such times of stress

mortality rates were high.47 There was considerable impetus to understand and manage the

disease; Fleck became part of this effort. In so doing, he took a practical stance against the

propaganda of German and Polish anti-Semites, who notoriously blamed Jews for the spread of

typhus. Conjoined with anti-Semitism, hygienic precautions became rationales for persecution,

and later for genocide.48 In later life, Fleck explicitly opposed his social epistemology to such

propagandizing rationales. But these developments came later. As an assistant working on

microbial immunology, he began the transition from vademecum to journal science.

In 1921, Weigl moved from Przmysl to Lwów’s University, creating a center for typhus

research in Fleck’s home city. However, despite his experience in bacteriology and serology,

publication of two short research papers (see Table 3), and collaborations with University

mathematicians as well as medical personnel, Fleck was unable to obtain a university position. It

is plausible, though not definite, that anti-Semitism played a role in Fleck’s exclusion from

academic research in the 1920s and 1930s.49 His first university appointment came in 1945, to

the Department of Medical Microbiology at the new Marie Curie Sklodowska University in

Lublin. Within twelve years, Fleck established successful research programs in Lublin (1945-

52) and Warsaw (1952-57), published 87 scientific articles and reviews, directed about 50

doctoral dissertations, and received a number of scientific honors, including the State Scientific

Prize of Poland (1953), election to the Polish Academy of Sciences (1954), and the country’s

highest scientific degree, the Officer’s Cross of Order of the Renaissance (1955).50 So his

scientific abilities and productivity were not lacking. But Fleck’s academic career was a later

phase of his scientific work. He had just begun to publish research papers when he left the

university setting. For the next twelve years (1923-1935), Fleck worked in Lwów’s public health

21
system. This was his second scientific transition: from specialized academic research on typhus

to routine serodiagnosis in a city hospital.

Fleck began this phase of his career in the Department of Internal Medicine at Lwów

General Hospital, but soon rose to a leadership position, in 1925 becoming head of the

Bacteriological and Serological Laboratory in the Department of Skin and Venereal Diseases.

The connection between serology and skin conditions was less peculiar than it might seem; many

serological tests (including the exanthin reaction for typhus) involved skin reactions to antigens

associated with various pathologies. Tuberculosis and syphilis were other foci for Fleck’s work

during this period, which for obvious reasons emphasized major public health concerns. This

public role contrasted with Fleck’s private laboratory (est. 1923), in which he pursued

bacteriology and serology projects of personal interest. The latter included studies of variation in

streptococci, etiology of Pemphigus vulgaris, and the specificity of the Wassermann test for

syphilis. Though the subject matter was close to that of Fleck’s professional life, his private

laboratory provided an ongoing contrast between the demands of his profession and personal

scientific commitments.

Another contrast was provided by Fleck’s research publications. Apart from a gap

coinciding with his promotion to head of the Bacteriological laboratory, Fleck published or

presented one or two articles each year, about half with a collaborator (see Table 3). This rate

increased over time, until anti-Semitic policies ended Fleck’s municipal employment in 1935.

But, for as long as he could, Fleck participated in what he later called the esoteric circle,

communicating research reports (written in Polish and German) to other experts. His efforts to

do while working in a city hospital rather than a university, establishing collaborations with

colleagues with different training and concerns, must have impressed upon him the importance

22
of research setting and the conventions of communicating research results. Additional

perspectives came into play with the inception of the Lwów Society for History of Medicine,

which Fleck co-founded in 1925 with his old supervisor from the Department of Internal

Medicine. Fleck’s first epistemological essay, presented at the fourth meeting of this group,

emphasized the distance between textbook theory and practice as well as the complexity of

pathological phenomena. He argued (presciently) that the latter prevented any complete

consistent and useful theory of pathological phenomena, and advocated instead a view of

pathology as ‘interactive history’ including multiple, inconsistent explanatory accounts.

In the late 1920s, Fleck experienced several more scientific transitions: a six-week visit to

the Vienna State Serotherapeutic Institute (1927), and a move from the General Hospital to the

Bacteriology Laboratory of the Lwów Social Sick Fund (a city health insurance fund, 1928).

While in the latter position, Fleck formulated his distinctive social epistemology, published

research papers on various pathogens and serological tests, and continued a long-term

collaboration with a mathematician at Lwów’s university on leukocyte distribution under various

immunological conditions. The shift to a new public health context, while maintaining and

expanding ties with the academic research community, across as well as within disciplinary

lines, further impressed on Fleck the entanglement of scientific knowledge with its social setting.

More detailed examination of these local contexts is needed, to flesh out this brief sketch into a

fully satisfactory reflexive explanation of the genesis and development of Fleck’s social

epistemology. A full account is beyond the scope of this paper. Nonetheless, the explanation is

clear in outline, at least: in the years preceding his epistemological reflections, Fleck experienced

a number of abrupt changes in the ‘social location’ of his immunology research. This movement

through the social structure of science made its divisions salient for him, in particular the effect

23
of social interactions and context on scientific practice, theory and publication. Continuing to

perform and publish immunological research in diverse settings (with private and historical

contrasts) required Fleck to repeatedly adapt to different ways of working. The social aspects of

scientific inquiry were in this sense forced upon him.

In the decade after his monograph’s publication, Fleck continued to pursue immunology

research through staggering social upheavals. From 1935, when anti-Semitic policies ended his

municipal employment, to late 1939, he worked solely in his private laboratory. After the Soviet

takeover of L’vov, Fleck was appointed to the staff of the new State Medical School and headed

the Microbiology Department at the State Bacteriological Institute (late 1939 to mid-1941).51

Under the German occupation of Lemberg, he was expelled from these positions and deported

with his family to the city’s Jewish ghetto (late 1941 to mid-1942). There, under harsh

conditions, he headed the Jewish Hospital’s bacteriological laboratory, developing a method of

early typhus diagnosis using patients’ urine and an experimental vaccine from the same source.52

The Third Reich soon learned of this work, and in early 1943 Fleck was arrested, imprisoned in

Auschwitz, and later that year transferred to Buchenwald to prepare typhus vaccine for the

Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS.53 Fleck (with his wife and son) survived in the camp until its

US liberation in April 1945. Returning to Poland, he at last secured an academic appointment

(see above), and picked up the strands of his pre-war research with surviving collaborators.

Fleck’s post-war research focused on a phenomenon he termed ‘leukergy:’ white blood cell

clumping into morphologically homogeneous groups, accelerated by infectious disease and

inflammation.54 Fleck’s approach to immunology was holistic and attuned to complexity, tying

together serodiagnosis, bacteriology, hematology and the emerging field of cellular immunology.

24
 Despite his success, and recognition of his work in Poland (see above), Fleck emigrated

to Israel in 1957, and there continued research on immunology and infectious disease at the

Israel Institute for Biological Research in Ness-Ziona (1957-59) and Hebrew University Medical

School in Jerusalem (1959-60). In contrast to his science, Fleck’s epistemology received little

attention during his lifetime, though he never repudiated his distinctive ideas. His final essay on

the theory of thought styles (see §3), responding to a discussion on ‘Science and human welfare’

(Science, July 1960), was rejected by Science, American Scientist, The British Journal for the

Philosophy of Science, and New Scientist, and remained unpublished until 1986.55 He died of

complications related to Hodgkin’s disease in 1961, the year before Kuhn’s citation of his

“almost unknown monograph” anticipating “many of my own ideas” appeared in the Preface to

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.56

4. Fleck and scientific objectivity

4.1 The received view of Fleck

Despite Kuhn’s citation, and the subsequent English translation of his monograph, Fleck remains

a marginal figure in Anglophone studies of science.57 Contemporary engagements with Fleck’s

work are of three sorts: (1) extension of the syphilis/Wasserman case study to encompass

additional socio-historical developments in biomedicine; (2) critique of his epistemology as

irreflexive, inconsistent or self-undermining; and (3) situating Fleck within science studies.58

The latter two, in particular, are distorted by neglect of Fleck’s conception of scientific

objectivity, and in particular his own stance toward that ideal. Attending to the role of scientific

objectivity in Fleck’s social epistemology deflates at least one influential critique of his view,

and clarifies his relation to more recent science studies.

25
 The received view of Fleck’s social epistemology (insofar as there is such a thing)

derives mainly from Kuhn’s prefatory reference to his work. Fleck is taken to be an explicitly

sociological anticipation of Kuhnian historical relativism, and in this sense a forerunner of late

20th century social constructivism concerning scientific knowledge.59 As discussed above (§2),

Fleck’s historical, comparative epistemology does have much in common with contemporary

constructivist views. These obvious constructivist aspects, together with the Wassermann case

study, lead some to characterize Fleck as an empirical sociologist of science rather than a

philosopher (e.g., Shapin 1986). But, though it would be “misguided…to distil [Fleck’s]

theorizing out of the empirical concerns in which it was grounded,” it is equally misguided to

treat him as an empirical historian (371) with “no evaluative axe to grind” regarding scientific

knowledge.60 Fleck did not limit himself to sociological explanations of scientific facts. But of

course this raises questions about his evaluative axe. To push the metaphor a bit further, how

does Fleck grasp and wield it, in his social epistemology?

As noted above, Fleck’s theory of thought styles is not committed to sweeping relativistic

tolerance (§3.1), nor does it directly support his own preferred scientific theories (§3.3). So what

are its critical, evaluative aspects? A familiar objection to social constructivist accounts of

scientific knowledge is that they cannot be proposed as epistemically preferable to alternatives.

Applied to Fleck’s theory of thought styles, the objection runs as follows. To succeed on its own

terms, Fleck’s comparative epistemology cannot exempt itself. So it cannot be presented as

preferable to alternative epistemological theories in an absolute sense. It must be articulated

from within, and so relative to, a specific thought style. If this originating thought style is that of

modern science, then Fleck’s theory is just empirical sociology, no more, no less. If it is some

other thought style, then Fleck’s theory is reflexively incoherent, imposing an external standard

26
onto modern science. Neither possibility allows for critical purchase on the thought-style of

modern science. So Fleck’s social epistemology does not allow for evaluation of science, or any

other epistemic enterprise. It is, perforce, a purely descriptive, comparative epistemology.

Sociologists of scientific knowledge, eager to assimilate Fleck’s views to their own, have not

conclusively rebutted this objection. Unchallenged, it deflates Fleck’s significance for

philosophy of science, relegating him (literally) to a footnote in the history of science studies.

However, Fleck’s account of the ideal of scientific objectivity, and its role in the social

structure and thought style of modern science, contains resources for a response to this objection.

Though others have defended Fleck’s epistemological stance, the connection with scientific

objectivity has not been remarked. For example, Borck (2004) characterizes Fleck’s

epistemology as an “epistemological intervention” reflexively instantiating the claim that “to

observe, to cognize is always to test and thus literally to change the object of investigation.”61

This “open epistemology” excludes ahistorical contexts of justification, but not justification tout

court, being “grounded in a firm belief in the scientific method” and “aimed at fostering a belief

in science as the way toward democracy.” This scientific stance, including but not limited to

medical immunology, distinguishes Fleck’s epistemology from most forms of idealism and

relativism. Borck is, however, too quick to diagnose “the more or less hidden normativity of

[Fleck’s] social epistemology” as vaguely political and detached from the material practice of

science. The normativity of Fleck’s view is hiding in plain sight, in his conception of scientific

objectivity. His stance regarding this ideal emerges most clearly in the conclusion of the 1935

monograph, the final stages of Genesis and Development.

4.2 Fleck’s objective epistemological stance

27
The concluding passage of Fleck’s 1935 monograph is as follows:

Thus, a structure is created step by step. Starting as a unique event or discovery,

as seen from the history of thought this is developed by the extraordinary forces
of the thought collective into what seems to it to be a necessarily recurrent and
thus objective and real finding.
The disciplined, shared mood of scientific thought consisting in the
elements enumerated, connected with the practical means and effects, yields the
specialized thought style of science. Good work done according to style, instantly
awakens a corresponding mood of solidarity in the reader. It is this mood which,
after a few sentences, compels him to regard the book highly and makes the book
effective. Only later does one examine the details to see whether they can be
incorporated into a system, that is, whether the realization of the thought style has
been consistently achieved and in particular whether procedure has conformed to
tradition (= to preparatory training). These determinations legitimize the work so
that it can be added to the stock of scientific knowledge and convert what has
been presented into scientific fact.62

Here Fleck is no longer speaking of the Wasserman reaction’s relation to syphilis; the case study

is complete. The stages of development described here are not of that fact, but a structure

(Gebilde), a finding conveyed in a book that “awakens a corresponding mood of solidarity in the

reader.” I think it plausible that, with these closing remarks, Fleck was alluding to his own work,

self-consciously announcing the response he hoped to elicit from readers. He is also careful to

distinguish this initial reaction from legitimation of the work, which takes time and depends on

the details and quality of argument, assessed from within its generative thought style. The

conclusion of Fleck’s monograph, its final sentences, are reflexively addressed to the theory of

thought styles itself –an explicit realization of the thought style of modern science, and the

culmination of the development of Fleck’s social epistemology.

If this interpretation is correct, and Fleck’s closing remarks are self-consciously reflexive

in this way, then the evaluative standards to which his theory is to be held are those of modern

science. Yet, evidently, it is not a scientific theory on a par with the germ theory of disease, or

the hypothesis of bacterial specificity, or models of chemical reactions between antigen and

28
antibody. And here the norms of scientific objectivity, together with the social structure of

modern science, provide guidance. Three norms of scientific objectivity are discussed

immediately before the passage quoted above: an obligation of impersonality, a tendency to reify

results, and aiming at a complete formal system of maximal information (§2.3). By conforming

to these norms within the social structure of science, inquirers put the thought style of modern

science into effect. The ideal is grounded in the social structure of modern science, which is in

turn maintained by patterns of communication of scientific results (Table 1, Figure 1). These

lines and divisions of scientific communication conform to the norms of scientific objectivity –

in this way, the ideal is put into effect in the social structure of modern science.

Fleck’s concluding discussion of the norms of scientific objectivity exemplifies each

norm in turn. First, scientists are obligated to “withdraw their own individuality,” treat others as

equals in the democratic community of research, and exhibit “personal modesty and caution.”

Fleck explains this norm in terms of the social structure of science and its “centrifugal tendency.”

In so doing, he reiterates earlier claims and refers back to previous arguments, using the first

person plural (“we previously discussed in detail…”). Second, scientists tend to objectivize or

reify the results of their inquiries, to take them as corresponding directly to reality. Fleck’s shifts

from first person plural to the third person, referring to “the scientist,” “different scientists,” and

“the collective.” That is, the tendency to reification is described in ‘objectivist’ terms. And

again Fleck emphasizes that this tendency is “inseparably bound up with…the migration of ideas

throughout the collective between the esoteric and the exoteric circles.” The third and last norm

is the striving for a complete formal system of “maximal information… the greatest possible

number of mutual relations between individual elements.” Here Fleck takes up the terminology

for formal or abstract symbolic systems: the “postulate concerning a maximum of information,”

29
elements, relations, numbers. Here there is no mention of the concrete social structure, but only

the thought style of modern science, abstracted from the social structure that puts it into effect.63

All this is not playful rhetoric, but the apotheosis of Fleck’s constructive epistemology.

Epistemic norms and the social structure of modern science are explicitly linked in scientific

objectivity, and the description of this linkage itself exemplifies those norms and emerges from

that social structure. The three norms “direct” the movement of facts through the thought-

collective of modern science, from the esoteric specialists to the exoteric public. The centrifugal

direction of the norms in practice specifies the ideal of objectivity as the democratic ideal of the

exoteric public: pure, clear, simple reality. By at once explaining and exemplifying the

epistemic norms of modern science, and concluding the monograph with a reflexive flourish,

Fleck indicates his own epistemological stance. The closing passage describes, exemplifies, and

acknowledges the standards of legitimation for Fleck’s own theory, as part of the social

epistemic structure developed in the preceding monograph. The theory of thought styles is

intended as a contribution to modern science.

The developmental explanation of Fleck’s social epistemology is consistent with this

interpretation (§3.3). According to the theory of thought styles, facts develop in three stages:

“first there is a signal of resistance in the chaotic initial thinking, then a definite thought

constraint, and finally a form to be directly perceived.”64 The development of Fleck’s social

epistemology conforms to this sequence. The first stage was the observation, forced upon him

by experience, that social interactions play a determinative role in scientific inquiry and its

outcome. Repeated transitions to different social epistemic locations within modern science

impressed upon him the epistemic significance of the social structure of science. Fleck’s

distinctive idea, the interdependence of the social and the epistemic, began with tentative

30
observations from this personal experience. He then sought to stabilize and organize the social-

epistemic relation, just as Wasserman and his colleagues attempted to stabilize serodiagnosis of

syphilis. His attempts at intersubjective consensus were realized in ties with the Polish School of

philosophy of medicine (and arguably, Polish philosophy of science); these framed his detailed

case study of the Wasserman reaction. Finally, the 1935 monograph sets out and defends Fleck’s

epistemological views for a general educated audience. The theory of thought styles is the

simple, general, vivid expression of his view in its final stage of development. It does not

resemble the provisional hypothesis of a research communication. But this is not because

Fleck’s stance toward it is inconsistently absolutist. Rather, his theory of thought styles is aimed

at the exoteric circle, and has the features appropriate to the role. Fleck does not inconsistently

privilege his own theory, but practices what it preaches, in the act of communicating his

innovative ideas.

4.3 Social constitution of scientific objectivity?

This commitment to scientific objectivity sets Fleck apart from more recent constructivist

accounts of scientific knowledge. Rather than deflating or debunking scientific objectivity,

Fleck both explains and demonstrates his own commitment to it as the driving ideal of modern

science. Scientific objectivity is thus the crux of what is distinctive in Fleck’s view:

interweaving the social and the epistemic to account for (and exemplify) scientific inquiry. The

socially constituted conception of scientific objectivity holds together and motivates Fleck’s

general theory of thought-styles. Therefore, assessing Fleck’s social epistemology is at once a

sociological and an epistemological project. The critical issue is whether or not Fleck’s theory of

thought styles conforms to norms of objectivity that put the thought style of modern science into

31
effect. That is, his social epistemology must satisfy norms of scientific objectivity grounded in

the interactive social structure of modern science. Let us grant that Fleck’s theory does satisfy

the three norms of objectivity he proposes.65 Then the fate of Fleck’s social epistemology turns

on whether these norms are grounded in the interactive social structure of modern science. If

not, then thought styles and thought collectives are on a par with the formal and empiricist

epistemologies Fleck rejects as obsolete fantasies, and his account of scientific objectivity floats

free of its empirical grounding in the social structure of science and its diverse media for

communicating ideas. In this case, the motivation for Fleck’s comparative epistemology

collapses, or at least attenuated. If, on the other hand, the social and epistemic aspects of science

are integrated into a mutually reinforcing system as Fleck describes, then his conception of

scientific objectivity is socially realized, and the theory of thought-styles thereby legitimized as

part of natural science.

Is the ideal of objective truth, clarity, and accuracy put into practice by the norms of

impersonality, reification of results and belief in progress toward a comprehensive formal

system? Recent work in history and philosophy of science, notably that of Daston and Galison

(1992, 2007) suggests that these norms are characteristic of important strands of modern

scientific work, in particular those associated with “mechanical objectivity” in the early 20th

century. But this conception of objectivity is inadequate to characterize the social epistemic

structure of modern science, for at least three reasons. First, modern science includes many

exceptions to each of the three norms. Many scientific fields exhibit little “reverence for number

and form,” do not aspire to complete formal systems, privilege expertise over impersonal

neutrality, and tend not to reify results. Contemporary research in biomedical immunology,

notably, violates all Fleck’s strictures at once, as do other areas of biomedicine and neuroscience.

32
These prominent exceptions indicate that Fleck’s account of scientific objectivity applies within

a socially and historically limited domain. It cannot, then, capture the ‘mood’ distinctive of

modern science and implemented within its overall social structure, as intended. Second, Fleck’s

“centrifugal dogma” of scientific knowledge treats the exoteric public as a monolithic, passive

recipient of the results of scientific inquiry. Research in science studies reveals this one-way

relation as overly simple and (arguably) ethically and/or politically undesirable. So the

‘directionality’ of the social epistemic structure of science does not hold up to empirical or

evaluative scrutiny.

Third, the proposed norms are individualistic, and so in tension with the relational,

interactive emphasis of Fleck’s epistemology. Scientific objectivity for individual scientists

requires each to withdraw his or her personal subjectivity from scientific inquiry, to objectivize

his or her own results, and to see these results as steps toward a complete system of knowledge.

But the social structure of science is maintained by traffic in these results, in their modes of

communicating knowledge. There is thus a tension in Fleck’s view, between interactive and

individualistic aspects. The three proposed norms of scientific objectivity do not engage the

interactions constitutive of the social epistemic structure of science. For all these reasons, the

three norms Fleck proposes for the ideal of scientific objectivity cannot fulfill this crucial role.

The situation in science is more complex, disunified and interactive than they admit.

5. Conclusion: renewing Fleck’s social epistemology

Where does this leave Fleck’s social epistemology? I have argued for three related conclusions.

First, that the core of Fleck’s epistemology is the relation of the ‘thought style of modern

science’ to the social structure of its thought collective. The ideal of scientific objectivity plays a

33
crucial mediating role: norms of objectivity, satisfied by inquirers within the social structure of

modern science, put its thought style into effect. Second, that Fleck’s distinctively social

epistemology is reflexively explained by his epistemically formative transitions (from medical

student to academic research assistant to serodiagnostic analyst) within the social structure of

modern science. The theory is thus coherent on its own terms, originating in his experience of

the entanglement of the social and the epistemic in biomedical research. Third, that Fleck’s

account of scientific objectivity was intended to reflexively legitimate the theory of thought

styles itself. Though three norms Fleck proposes are not adequate to the task, the core idea of his

social epistemology merits further consideration: the social constitution of “the ideal of truth,

clarity and accuracy” put into effect by norms for practicing scientists.

I conclude with a suggestion, for renewing Fleck’s social epistemology, in light of

empirical science studies that succeeded Fleck’s own work, albeit from different epistemic

stances. His idea of developing a socio-historical epistemology as part of natural science, was

animated by the ideal of objectivity, and grounded in its social constitution. One way to take up

this innovative idea and make it useful today, is to refocus the norms of scientific objectivity

onto the very features Fleck’s simple, individualistic norms neglected: the interactions,

disunities, complexities as different strands of inquiry collide and combine.66 This would

preserve Fleck’s pioneering insight, and ground it firmly in its original source: the multifarious

social interactions of scientific inquiry.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

[removed for blind review]

34
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ENDNOTES
1
Bonah (2002, 187), Freudenthal and Löwy (1988, 626).
2
E.g., Bloor (1986), Harwood (1986), Shapin (1986), Golinski (1998). Wettersten (1990) takes
a dissenting view.
3
Fleck1986/29 (47).
4
Fleck 1986/29 (47), 1986/47 (134); see also Fleck 1986/35.
5
Fleck 1979/35 (95).
6
See esp. Fleck 1986/36 (80-87).
7
Fleck 1979/35 (51, 21). In a 1935 essay on observation and perception, Fleck explicitly rejects
four tenets of ‘idealized’ philosophy of science: (1) that observations can be dichotomously
classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; (2) that ‘good’ observations yield the same or consistent results; (3)
that observations (descriptions of events) are fundamentally additive, summing to a consistent
whole; (4) that a lone researcher is possible (1986/35, 59). See also Fleck 1986/36 (111-112) for
the irrelevance of normative dualisms to ongoing scientific inquiry.
8
Fleck 1979/35 (51, 178-9n5), 1986/36 (93-98).

40
9
Fleck 1986/35 (76).
10
Fleck 1979/35 (44-45, 49).
11
Each person belongs to many exoteric circles, and few or no esoteric ones. This overlapping
membership is one way thought-styles influence one another. See also Fleck 1986/36 (101-110).
12
Fleck 1979/35 (110-112).
13
Fleck’s association of science with democracy dates back to a 1929 essay, before his theory of
thought-styles was fully articulated: “Natural science is the art of shaping a democratic reality
and being directed by it - thus being reshaped by it. It is an eternal, synthetic rather than
analytic, never-ending labor - eternal because it resembles that of a river that is cutting its own
bed” (1986/29, 54). He also associates democracy with other practices involving collaborative
experimentation: artisans, sailors, leatherworkers, barber-surgeons, gardeners, children playing) -
“uniquely democratic… serious or playful work… done by many, where common or opposite
interests met repeatedly” (1986/29, 50-51). These evocative associations notwithstanding, the
sense in which the elite are dependent on the masses in modern science is not very clear (105-
106).
14
I focus on the English translation of Fleck’s monograph, since the current consensus on Fleck
stems primarily from this edition. Page numbers in this section refer to this edition, unless
otherwise specified.
15
Fleck later applied his theory of thought-styles to the Buchenwald serology lab, which
consisted of prisoners of diverse backgrounds (all but Fleck lacking immunological expertise),
under enormous pressure to establish the scientific fact of a typhus vaccine (1986/46).
16
This is of course a rough division; for Fleck, this dichotomy is not strict.
17
Fleck calls such persistent associations of ideas across different socio-historical contexts
‘proto-ideas.’
18
Fleck 1979/35 (142; italics mine).
19
Fleck 1979/35 (142).
20
Fleck calls this (in a final footnote) the “postulate concerning maximum information” (182,
n28). This belief is associated with a conception of scientific progress: Within a “branch of
knowledge,” the number of facts inevitably increases over time, and differences of opinion
decrease as new ideas are constrained thereby (79, 83). Fleck uses the image of an increasingly
intricate ‘network’ of intersecting strands of thought, in which facts serve as nodes for
convergence and initiation of diverse strands of research. As controversy is ‘damped’ over time,
production of new facts is more efficient; in this sense, the growth of knowledge ‘accelerates’
within a line of inquiry.
21
The monograph was written in German and published in Switzerland, apparently to gain a
wider audience. Fleck wrote mainly in Polish, but also in German, both in philosophy and in
science (see bibliography in Cohen and Schnelle 1986a, 445-457).
22
That Fleck’s work is known today is largely due to Kuhn’s citation in the Preface to The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, viii-ix).
23
References in Cohen and Schnelle 1986a (456-457).
24
Löwy (1990, 2000), Herrnstein Smith (2006).
25
Chwistek (who probably knew Fleck personally) grounded his epistemological relativism and
metaphysical pluralism in a nominalist and constructivist philosophy of mathematics. Though
his contributions to logic, metalogic and metamathematics were respected, his views were out of
step with those the leading Polish logicians (Kotarbinski, Tarski), and his Lwów philosophy was

41
“characterized by considerable linguistic latitude, in stark contrast to the Lvov-Warsaw school”
(Ajdukiewicz 2001/1934, 249). So his support was little help to Fleck. Reichenbach’s treatment
of Fleck is sympathetic, but brief - though he agrees that our ‘seeing’ is influenced by social
milieu, he asserts that an objective world can be constructed from “intellectual integration of
subjective views,” dismissing a core assumption of Fleck’s epistemology without argument
(1938, 224-225, n6).
26
Giedymin (1986, 210) also attributes it to the publication of Fleck’s monograph in German by
a Swiss publisher. But his philosophical journal articles of the same period, all but one in Polish,
were ignored as well. Wolniewicz (1986, 218-219) considers and rejects an alternative socio-
political explanation: the Polish School was committed to ideals of liberalism, including
rationality and the possibility of rational discussion and agreement. Since thought-collectives go
against this ideal, Fleck’s theory was unacceptable, and so repressed. In ‘Fleckian’ terms, the
theory of thought-styles did not conform to the thought-style of the Lwów-Warsaw school.
Interestingly, Wolniewicz immediately and without further argument dismisses this explanation
as unreasonable - rejecting and validating Fleck’s theory in one stroke (setting aside the fact that
Fleck did not restrict sociological influences on science to the political domain).
27
Markiewicz 1982, Giedymin 1986, Ajdukiewicz 2001/1934, Krajewski and Jadacki 2001.
28
The key idea was that psycho-physical actions/products (such as artworks, scientific theories
and language) could be studied as if independent of the mental acts that created them in virtue of
being “conserved” in physical forms (text, equation, picture, etc.) affording them (somewhat)
autonomous roles in our cognitive lives. This carved out an autonomous domain for philosophy,
distinct from psychological study of mental acts and products as such (Giedymin 1986). Fleck’s
sociological epistemology effaced this autonomy.
29
Ajdukiewicz 2001/1934, 247. Fleck was certainly aware of the similarities, as he dedicated his
1935 essay on perception to Ajdukiewicz, requesting his “kind acceptance” (Schnelle 1986a, 16).
But there is no recorded response from Ajdukiewicz, who changed his view (to “radical
empiricism”) the next year (Jedynak 2001).
30
For similar reasons, Fleck’s theory of thought-styles unlikely to appeal to the Vienna Circle,
which shared the Polish School’s commitment to logical rigor, and interest in the foundations of
logic, mathematics and physics. (But see Koterski 2002 for parallels between Fleck’s and
Neurath’s sociological epistemology.) The lone exception was Izydora Dambska (1937), who
took the trouble to reject Fleck’s view to highlight her own account of the relation between
conventionalism and relativism, which distinguished justified (non-relativistic) from arbitrary
(relativistic) conventions (Wolenski 2001). Since, Dambska argued, the thought-style of
common-sense immediate experience is (nearly) universal and biologically explicable, facts
associated with it are non-relative, justified conventions, contra the thoroughgoing socio-
historical relativism of thought-styles. This argument suffers from now-familiar problems of
characterizing ‘common-sense immediate experience’ in a way that fits it to serve as a
foundation for scientific knowledge or justification.
31
This summary draws on Löwy 1990, 2000.
32
In a striking instance of this, Fleck’s presentation on thought-styles was left out of the 1937
Meeting Report (compiled by Bilikiewicz) of the history and philosophy of medicine and
biology division after the annual conference (Löwy 1988).
33
Bilikiewicz 1990/39 (258-9). Bilikiewicz also, with somewhat more justification, objected to
Fleck’s effacement of the distinction between natural science and humanities, noting that, if

42
science is responsible to human creativity rather than to Nature, then historical studies of science
lose their value.
34
Fleck’s essays after 1935 consistently affirm this counteractive aim (see Table 2).
35
Fleck describes sociology of knowledge (specifically, the work of Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl,
Gumplowicz and Jerusalem) as the “embryo of modern theory of cognition” (i.e., his own
theory; 1986/36, 80). His early essays do not mention sociology of knowledge, and remarks of
1935-36 indicate a cursory (or second-hand) engagement with that field. Schnelle (1986b)
concurs. Though Weber’s concepts of Lebenstil and Lebensreglementierung are similar,
designating the behaviors and value-representations of certain groups, Fleck seems not to have
been aware of these ideas (Rotenstreich 1986, 176n15), nor those of Mannheim and Lukacs
(Harwood 1986, 174-5, after Schnelle 1982). ‘Thought-style’ is a term from Mannheim (1925;
in Elkana 1986, 312) - but Fleck’s initial formulation was in Polish, and he makes no mention of
Mannheim in his work. Interestingly, it is precisely because sociologists of knowledge make an
exception of social science from social conditioning that Fleck considers their work an
“embryonic” (undeveloped) form of his own.
36
Here I rely on Löwy (1990, 2000).
37
Fleck 1986/29, 54.
38
Löwy 1986, Freudenthal and Löwy 1988.
39
1986, 421.
40
This was in keeping with the generally provincial state of Polish biomedicine at the time
(Löwy 1986, 1990, 2000). So Fleck was doubly an ‘outsider’ in biomedicine.
41
Freudenthal and Löwy (1988, 635). See also Moulin 1986, Zalc 1986.
42
As a side note, the theory of thought-styles is a rather weak strategy for defending one’s
preferred scientific theories, since it gives no absolute reason to prefer them. It could not help
Fleck argue that holistic complex accounts of immune phenomena are better than simple
reductive ones, only that there are alternatives to currently accepted views, some accessible
within a given thought-style, and some not. The relation of Fleck’s epistemology and science
was more likely analogous than instrumental: both fields attempt to theorize historical, context-
dependent, multi-leveled, interactive, continuously changing phenomena. So his considerations
about the medical way of thinking (for example) apply reflexively.
43
By 1934 his theory was complete, including the account of scientific objectivity (formulated
after 1929).
44
In German: Lemberg; in Russian, L’vov. The tripartition of Poland endured from 1795 to
WWI. See Markiewicz (1982) for a sketch of Lwów as the setting for Fleck’s philosophy and
science; Schnelle (1986a) for more biographical details on Fleck.
45
During WWII, Lwów was occupied first by the Soviets (1939-41) and then the Third Reich
(1941-45).
46
This discussion draws on Löwy 1986. See also Moulin 1986, Silverstein 1988, Podolsky and
Tauber 1997.
47
Weindling 2000, Appendix I (428-435).
48
For examples of anti-Semitic propaganda featuring typhus, see Weindling 2000 (Figs 1, 13-
15). Fleck’s family belonged to Lwów’s large and culturally diverse Jewish population, which
comprised nearly a third of the city’s inhabitants before WWII.

43
49
Fleck married Ernestina Waldman in 1923; their son Ryszard was born the following year.
The timing suggests that Fleck sought employment in 1923 to support his young family. On anti-
Semitism as a possible factor, see: Schnelle 1986a, Nowak 1989, Friszke 2003.
50
See bibliography in Cohen and Schnelle 1986a (449-456).
51
Fleck was also a consultant at the State Institute of Mother and Child Welfare during this
period. These multiple appointments seem to have been supported by a pediatrician, a Dr. Gröer,
employed at Lwów University (Fleck and Fryderyka 1944, Schnelle 1986a).
52
Weindling (2000, 436). Fleck estimated typhus infection rates in the Lemberg ghetto at ~70%;
he injected himself, his family and over 500 volunteers with the experimental typhus vaccine
before his arrest and deportation (Kogon 1946, 251; quoted in Schnelle 1986a, 20-22).
53
Details of “prisoner politics” in the camp laboratories, attempts by prisoner-researchers to
sabotage or subvert the vaccine project, and the connection to medical experiments on prisoners
in Kogon (1946, 663-665; quoted in Schnelle 1986a, 24-27), Weindling (2000, 363-372). Fleck
later applied his theory of thought-styles to the Buchenwald serology lab, which consisted of
prisoners of diverse backgrounds (all but Fleck lacking immunological expertise), under
enormous pressure to establish the scientific fact of a typhus vaccine (1986/46). Near the end of
his life he wrote, but did not publish, an account of his own experience in the camps (Schnelle
1986a, 28-29).
54
Fleck and Murczynska (1947a, 1947b), Fleck et al (1947). Fleck reported observing the
phenomenon in 1942, being led to the question by observations of 1931; earlier attempts to
publish were interrupted by the war (Fleck et al 1947, 1283; Fleck and Murczynska 1947a). His
collaborators included mathematicians as well as experimental immunologists.
55
Schnelle 1986a (32); Fleck 1986/60.
56
Kuhn (1962, viii-ix).
57
Fleck’s impact on Polish philosophy of science has also been minimal (Krajewski and Jadacki
2001). For example, the Polish philosophical quarterly Dialectics and Humanism (1974-1991),
published by the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Committee for Philosophy of Science and the
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, contains no references to Fleck before 1980 (Cackowski,
34) - which cites the 1979 English translation. Löwy’s work on Fleck and Polish philosophy of
medicine is a happy exception to these general trends.
58
Though these issues are not fully separable, the differences of emphasis among them are
pronounced enough to usefully classify the recent literature on Fleck. Examples of the first
include: Amsterdamska (2004), Brorson (2006), Gradmann (2004), Löwy (2004a, b); of the
second, Brorson (2000), Van den Belt and Gremmen (1990); of the third, Elkana (1986),
Harwood (1986), Heelan (1986), Wittich (1986), Brorson and Andersen (2001), Bonah (2002).
59
Fleck as constructivist about scientific knowledge: Bloor (1986), Giedymin (1986), Harwood
(1986), Golinski (1998, 32-35), Brorson (2000), Hacking (2002, 60-61).
60
Shapin (1986; 325, 358, 371).
61
Borck (2004, 453), quoting Fleck 1986/29 (53).
62
Fleck 1979/35 (145). These concluding remarks immediately follow the introduction of three
norms of objectivity discussed in §2.3 above.
63
1935/79 (144-145, n28 182-183).
64
Fleck 1979/35 (95).
65
A separate argument is needed to show that Fleck’s theory in fact does satisfy these norms he
proposes. I have argued here only that he asserts and is committed to its doing so.

44
66
[Reference removed for blind review.]

45