Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact by Ludwik Fleck
N.B.: The book was originally published auf Deutsch (in German) in 1935 and more than 40 years later, translated into and published in English.
If you are unfamiliar with this text, I’m not surprised. In fact, neither would Thomas S. Kuhn be, for in his foreword he writes, “My purpose in calling for a translation was not simply 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 have encountered only two people who had read the book independent of my intervention.” Not a good foot to start on, Mr. Kuhn.
At first, my biggest complaint with Ludwick Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact for Writing for Electronic Communities (WEC) was that it was written for an informed audience, which we are not. Then I asked myself, “Would Dr. Bill Wolff seriously have us read something as far off base as a 1935 German book on syphilis if there wasn’t something deeper going on?”
The conclusion I arrived at, or am still arriving at as I give it more thought, is that there is something abstract going on here that is greater than any one thought or one person can provide. And this is what links us to Fleck’s god awful reading for 2008. What is important to understand here is that the topic of syphilis is simply a guiding agent leading us towards understanding how knowledge is acquired and how fact is accepted as fact. Because we probably know little about biochemistry (is that even what this is?) and syphilis, we are expected to come to the text as writing students, students of a community, and do little more than skim over the technical stuff to reach an understanding of the thought collective.
This also brings up Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice and the role that a community plays in developing mainstream ideas. Fleck’s “thought collective” (as I understand it in English—perhaps I’ve completely lost the true meaning of Denkkollektive and shouldn’t even be saying “thought collective” but I wouldn’t know because I’m not fluent in German) seems to have been one of, I assume, many precursors to Wenger’s “learning community,” where both assimilate ideas over a period of time.
To grasp these ideas, think of knowledge as evolution. We were once apes, walking on all fours, hairy, naked, and ‘uncivilized.’ But one mutant gene compounded with another and another led us to become humans who communicate and are no longer able to digest raw meat. Had our evolutionary track taken a detour (perhaps it did already), we may not be here today, or maybe we’d be barking instead of speaking, who knows. The same is true for how thoughts develop and how we come across facts as fact.
It seems to me that the purpose of reading Fleck for WEC is to become critical surveyors of information attained in cyber world.
My head hurts just thinking about it.
