![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Much of Ludwik Fleck’s work on the social constitution of knowledge, scientific facts, and objects of inquiry is informed by a specific use of transcendental arguments. This paper analyzes the ways in which Fleck looks for “conditions of possibilities” for the stylization and circulation of cognition. Following a brief discussion of his political agenda regarding science’s “cultural mission,” the paper offers a reconstruction of Fleck’s implicit concept of the transcendental. It is argued that Fleck addresses scientific truth as an ongoing revealing and concealing of possibilities for doing research. By implication, the truth about a scientific fact is at once situated in scientific practices and transcended by a horizon of possibilities. The transcendental takes shape in Fleck’s social epistemology as a result of the reflection upon knowledge production’s “situated transcendence.”
Notes
1 I put aside approaches that, though irreducible to this three-part division, are more or less only of historical interest. Examples in this regard are the neo-Kantian functionalist transcendentalism, Husserl’s situational transcendentalism of the “correlative a priori,” and Paul Lorenzen’s constructivist-methodical transcendentalism.
2 In resuming the line of reasoning set out in the methodological introduction, I should like to pinpoint the following specification. In the analytical epistemology (as this is, in particular, illustrated by authors like Peter Strawson, Barry Stroud, and Christopher Peacock), the use of transcendental arguments is linked in the first place to the individuation of concepts by their possession conditions. Epistemological representationalism (in a verificationist or a non-verificationist form) grounds necessarily this use since the concepts get individuated by their patterns of relations to the way experience represents the world as being (Peacocke Citation1989, 4). For Strawson, the most transcendental arguments can establish is a certain sort of interdependence of conceptual capacities and beliefs. In Continental philosophy, the use of transcendental arguments is linked to the agenda of minimizing and eventually overcoming epistemological representationalism. Ludwik Fleck anticipates in several respects the search for an anti-representationalist (and anti-essentialist) transcendental reflection.
3 To be sure, it is only an empirical observation when one says that the intellectual mood X goes (as a rule) hand in hand with the sort of cognition Y. Yet this is not the case if one goes on to state that when the intellectual mood X takes place in the process of cognition, then a class of cognitive constraints Z gets necessarily imposed on the knowledge production. This is no longer an empirical observation, but a (local) transcendental argument from the type Fleck employs in his work.
4 See in this regard Rheinberger (Citation2007).
5 In the debate with Bilikiewicz on science’s situatedness in cultural milieus and the concept of thought style, Fleck made use of the opportunity to respond indirectly to the positive reviews of his book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935) by Nazi-authors in German medical and psychological journals. Prima facie the reviews leave the impression of a suspicious intimacy between Fleck’s anti-objectivist and anti-essentialist approach to scientific research, and the relativist denial of science’s culturally unconditioned character as this denial has been supported by those who looked for the “new German thought style” (an expression coined by a reviewer of Fleck’s book) and a correspondent “ideological transformation” of the scientific worldview. In making the case that the unavoidable stylization of scientific research is by no means a precondition for political ideologization of science, Fleck countered the positive reception of his ideas by Nazi-authors. See in this regard Borck (Citation2004).
6 Fleck spells out this agenda in his final paper entitled “Crisis in Science.” He advocates here the ethos of autonomous research by trying to explicate his vision of science’s “cultural mission.” Furthermore, he insists on the role the comparative sociology of thought styles ought to play in accomplishing this mission. (Fleck Citation1986, 156–57) The growing diversification of thought styles in science—so his argument goes—increases the capacity of scientific communities to resist the political manipulation of their research work. Moreover, this diversification is a part of science’s cultural mission.
7 Foucault “operationalizes” the idea of historical a priori still more in his genealogical studies when at issue are particular configurations of the knowledge-power nexus. In his lecture “What is Critique?” Foucault (Citation1997, 29) makes the case that in the early modernity the emancipation proceeded in particular through a proliferation of the “arts of governing”—the art of pedagogy, the art of politics, the art of economics, and so on. Accordingly, the primary definition of critique is “the art of not being governed so much,” or the art of reflected intractability. The balance between the “arts of governing” and critique in given historical situation is defined by an historical a priori. The latter is to be taken into account by the historian who is going to address the question of what are the limits of the right to govern in a historical situation. The historical a priori in this context are the links between structures of knowledge and mechanisms of coercion. More generally, the historical a priori is any particular nexus of knowledge-power (existing as a diversity of practices) whose description allows one to grasp what constitutes the acceptability of an institutionalized system of these practices.
8 Foucault’s (Citation1972, 126) definition of the “positivity of a discourse” strongly bears a resemblance with Fleck’s historical totality of a thought style: The positivity of a discourse defines a “relatively small space of communication, since it is far from possessing the breadth of a science with all its historical development, from its most distant origin to its present stage; but a more extensive space than the play of influences that have operated from one author to another, or than the domain of explicit polemics.”
9 To be sure, Fleck’s approximates Foucault-like archaeological issues when he tackles the problematic of the “archaic forms of thinking.” He regards these forms not so much as exotic styles of thought, but rather as manifestations of different kinds of episteme.
10 See in this regard Zittel (Citation2012).
11 On the conceptual figure of “situated transcendence” as mediator between the hermeneutics of scientific practices and holist epistemology see Ginev (Citation2006, 37–87).
12 Thus, Fleck describes the communal belief in the existence of a “serodiagnostic reaction with syphilis” as the distinctive feature of syphilology’s thought collective in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In Chapter 3 of his main opus, Fleck scrutinizes those “habits of thought” which at once have been brought into being by this belief and have been established as a milieu of the belief’s persistence.
13 The way in which Fleck makes use of the concept of Gestalt is nicely scrutinized by Zittel (Citation2014). This author shows how Fleck extrapolates and generalizes the concept to cover not only the perception but also the constitution of scientific objects.
14 From the viewpoint of philosophical hermeneutics, a thought community is conservative because of its extreme unwillingness to abandon its prejudices (both as Vorurteile and Vorverständnisse) of interpretation.
15 By migrating from the esoteric to the exoteric circle, scientific knowledge is no longer attached to the initiated researchers’ belief in transcendent objects. Accordingly, scientific knowledge as being possessed by the initiated starts a transformation into a profane utility. The end-point of this transformation is the circulation of scientific knowledge as a pure commodity in society.
16 For a detailed discussion of Fleck’s socio-historical epistemology with regard to the tenets of standpoint epistemologies see Zittel (Citation2010).
17 Standpoint epistemologies have unfolded certain motifs of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. The specificity of the collective thought of a social group can be traced to the group’s life conditions. More specifically, the champions of these epistemologies adhere to Mannheim’s argument that the view of relationism (relating forms of knowledge production to social positions) does not imply epistemological relativism. In trying to answer the question of how it is possible that Fleck at once proposes a relativist interpretation of truth and denies that truth is relative, Seidel (Citation2011, 224) reaches the conclusion that “Mannheim’s description of his purported relationist solution is not just similar to but in its basic idea nearly the same as Fleck’s treatment of the issue.” On my reading, there is difference between the programs of Mannheim and Fleck that has to be conceived as a matter of principle: Mannheim tries to overcome cognitive relativism by means of epistemic relativization, whereas Fleck develops his argument against relativism by referring implicitly to different sorts of hermeneutic circle of knowledge production.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dimitri Ginev
Dimitri Ginev is author of Entre Anthrpologie et Hermeneutique (2014), The Context of Constitution (2006), The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism (2011), Practices and Possibilities (2013). He edited with Robert Cohen Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science (1996) and with Babette Babich; The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology (2014). He is a founder and editor-in-chief of the international journal Studia Culturologica.