Hermeneutic Perspectives on Science in Fleck’s Work and Hermeneutic Critique of Constructivist Epistemology

Abstract

This article seeks to provide a systematic reconstruction of the hermeneutic motifs in Ludwik Fleck’s social epistemology and comparative cognitive sociology. The exegetical analysis of his work is extended and complemented by a hermeneutic critique of Fleck’s psychologism. I begin with the recognition that Fleck’s theory of the constitution of scientific facts involves a distinction between phenomena and observable facts. This distinction is underdeveloped in his book, but it plays a central role in his scientific papers. After discussing Fleck’s constitutional theory by putting emphasis upon the historicity of scientific facts, I provide a rationale for the claim that the kind of sociality he attributes to the thought collectives is closer to the concept of interpretive trans-subjectivity rather than normative inter-subjectivity. To this sociality corresponds a concept of thought style as an open horizon of interpretation. By approaching the way in which such a horizon reveals and conceals a field of in...