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Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact Edited by Thaddeus J Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn Genesis and and Robert K. Merton ii 'I Translated by Fred Bradley ·1 Development of a •I and Thaddeus J. Trenn :! Scientific Fact Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn Ludwik Fleck The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Originally published as Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einfiihrung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv, © 1935 by Benno Schwabe & Co., Basel, Switzerland. Contents The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1979 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1979 Paperback edition 1981 Printed in the United States of America Foreword Vil 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 12 13 14 15 16 Preface xiii ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25325-1 ISBN-10: 0-226-25325-2 Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Overview of Contents xxiii Fleck, Ludwik. Prologue xxvii Genesis and development of a scientific fact. One How the Modern Concept of Syphilis Originated Translation of Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Two Epistemological Conclusions from the Bibliography: p. Established History of a Concept 20 Includes index. Three The Wassermann Reaction and 1. Science-Social aspects. 2. Science-Philosophy. Its Discovery 53 3. Syphilis-Diagnosis-Wassermann reaction. 4. Knowledge, Sociology of. I. Title. Four Epistemological Considerations Concerning Ql 75.5.F5913 507' .2 79-12521 the History of the Wassermann Reaction 82 ISBN 0-226-25325-2 (paper) Commentary and Annotation e The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Biographical Sketch 149 Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Descriptive Analysis 154 vi Contents Foreword Notes 167 The appearance of an English translation of Ludwik Fleck's Gene· Bibliography 185 sis and Development of a Scientific Fact realizes a project I have urged on various friends and acquaintances (but not on the present Index 193 editors) ever since I first encountered the book a quarter of a century ago. My purpose in calling for a translation was not simply illustrations to make Fleck's work accessible to an English-speaking audience but rather to provide it with an audience at all. In twenty-six years I Figure 1 34 have encountered only two people who had read the book inde­ Figure 2 67 pendent of my intervention. (One was Edward Shils, who has Figure 3 138 apparently read everything; the other Mark Kac, who had known the author personally.) The editors of this edition tell me that they Figure4 140 too first learned of the book from me. Under the circumstances, I Figures 143 have not known how to decline their invitation to provide a prefa­ tory note reflecting on my own encounter with Fleck. To the best of my recollection, I first read the book during the year 1949 or early in 1950. At that time I was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, trying both to prepare myself for the transition from research physics to history of science and also, simultaneously, to explore a revelation that had come to me two or three years before.' That revelation was the role played in scientific development by the occasional noncumulative episodes that I have viii Foreword ix Foreword since labeled scientific revolutions. On that non-topic there was no which I cited his book in my Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 5 established bibliography, and my reading was therefore explora­ But I am not sure that I took anything much more concrete from tory, often owing much to serendipity. A footnote in R. K. Mer­ Fl~ck's work, though I obviously may and undoubtedly should ton's Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century have. At the time I found Fleck's German extraordinarily difficult, England2 led me to the work of the developmental psychologist Jean partly because mine was rusty and partly because I possessed Piaget. Though Merton's book was an obvious desideratum for a neither the background nor the vocabulary to assimilate discus­ prospective historian of science, Piaget's work surely was not. Even sions of medicine and biochemistry, especially when viewed from more unlikely was the footnote that led me to Fleck. I found it in the to me unknown and yet vaguely repulsive perspective of a Hans Reichenbach's Experience and Prediction. 3 sociology of the collective mind. The lines in the margin of my copy Reichenbach was not, of course, a philosopher who thought of of the book suggest that I responded primarily to what had already facts as possessing a life cycle. Citing the plate in which Fleck been very much on my mind: changes in the gestalts in which displays changing representations of the human skeleton, he wrote: nature presented itself, and the resulting difficulties in rendering "Intellectual operations have shown us the way to overcome the "fact" independent of "point of view." Even at that date, though limitations of our subjective intuitional capacities. Every pic­ much engaged in exploring Kohler, Kaffka, and other gestalt ture may, besides containing false traits, introduce some true psychologists, I resisted (as Fleck surely would have) their frequent features into the composition." 4 Fleck would no more have written substitution of "seeing as" for "seeing." What I saw when I looked those sentences than Reichenbach would have spoken of the "gene­ at the famous duck-rabbit was either the duck or the rabbit, but sis and development of a scientific fact." But the latter was Fleck's not the lines on the page--at least not until after much conscious title, and Reichenbach had to include it when citing the plate. effort. The lines were not the facts of which the duck and rabbit Reading the citation, I immediately recognized that a book with were alternative interpretations. that title was likely to speak to my own concerns. Acquaintance Rereading the book now, as I have not done in the interim, I find with Fleck's text soon confirmed that intuition and inaugurated my many insights that I might fruitfully have worked into my view­ never-very-systematic campaign to introduce a wider audience to point. I am, for example, much impressed by Fleck's discussion it. One of those to whom I showed it was James Bryant Conant, (chap. 4, sec. 4) of the relation between journal science and then President of Harvard but shortly to become the U.S. High vademecum science. The fatter may conceivably be the point of Commissioner for Germany. A few years later he reported with glee origin for my own remarks about textbook science, but Fleck is the reaction of a German associate to his mention of the title: concerned with another set of points-the personal, tentative, and "How can such a book be? A fact is a fact. It has neither genesis incoherent character of journal science together with the essential nor development." That paradox was, of course, what had drawn and creative act of the individuals who add order and authority by me to the boo'k. selective systematization within a vademecum. Those issues, which I have more than once been asked what I took from Fleck and had escaped me entirely, merit much additional consideration, not can only respond that I am almost totally uncertain. Surely I was least because they can be approached empirically. Again, given my reassured by the existence of his book, a nontrivial contribution own special concerns, I am particularly excited by Fleck's remarks because in 1950 and for some years thereafter I knew of no one else (chap. 4, sec. 3) on the difficulties of transmitting ideas between who saw in the history of science what I was myself finding there. two "thought collectives," above all by the closing paragraph on the Very probably also, acquaintance with Fleck's text helped me to possibilities and limitations of participation in several "thought realize that the problems which concerned me had a fundamentally communities." ("Very different thought styles are used for one and sociological dimension. That, in any case, is the connection in the same problem more often than are very closely related ones. It Foreword x Foreword xi (chap. happens more frequently that a physician simultaneously pursues the corroboration of the thought structure [Denkgebilde]" that studies of a disease from a clinical-medical or bacteriological view­ 4, sec. 3). These and many other phrases in the book indicate point together with that of the history of civilization, than from a the effects of participation in a thought collective are somehow clinical-medical or bacteriological one together with a purely chem­ categorical or a priori. What the thought collective supplies its to ical one.") Here, too, Fleck opens avenues for empirical research. members is somehow like the Kantian categories, prerequisite thus Readers will find many other similar aper<;us in Fleck's rich and any thought at all. The authority of a thought collective is the individual ·only penetrating book. Though much has occurred since its publica­ more nearly logical than social, yet it exists for a group. tion, it remains a brilliant and largely unexploited resource. But by virtue of his induction into problematic, and the position it elaborates is not free of fundamental problems, and That position is, of course, extraordinarily for me these cluster, as they did on first reading, around the notion Fleck's occasional attempts to develop it by distinguishing between me unenlight­ of a thought collective. What troubles me is not that a thought the passive and active elements of knowledge are to terms borrowed from collective is a hypostatized fiction, though I think it is.
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