Fleck and the Way the World Exists

The patron of the chapter is Ludwik Fleck, a Polish physician of Jewish origin, who published a book in Basel in 1935, which shocked the certainty of scientific procedures and opened up the problems of the social context of scientific research. Thomas Kuhn, creating his idea of scientific revolutions, and Bruno Latour, discussing the sociology of science, as well as the sociology of knowledge more broadly, were based on Fleck’s observations, widely discussed in the chapter. The chapter contains an introduction to this issue, covering researchers as Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, whose views become the starting point for the analysis of Fleck’s concepts. The next part of the chapter deals with knowledge as a social entity, referring i.a. to François Lyotard and his book on postmodern condition, and David Bloor, the creator of the so-called strong programme, directly deriving the social basis of knowledge from Plato’s definition. In the following part, there is a description of the understanding of the sociology of knowledge proposed by Bruno Latour, who deals with knowledge in this context in a fundamental way, e.g. formulates a specific ontology explaining the mutual relation of the world of things and the world of their social presence. This ontology, known as ANT—Actor-Network-Theory, goes far beyond linguistic issues, but at the same time reminds us of the basic nature of the relationships studied. Their ancient character is reminded by the distinction: Logos vs. Mythos, described by Władysław Stróżewski.