For your eyes only: Transcendental pragmatism in Ludwik Fleck

Abstract

Ludwik Fleck’s main contribution lies in the awareness for the deeply social and collective dimension of scientific work, its procedures, but also its style and mode of thinking. However, it is this very focus that gives for a lot of his reader the licence to put Fleck into the constructivist camp. This is wrongheaded and based on a misinterpretation of the status of the social element in research. To show that I read Fleck as a humble (i.e. non-Kantian) transcendentalist to appreciate both, the historically sensitive approach in Fleck and its non-constructivist aspects. Thereby, we find a middle ground circumventing naïve realism as well as full-blown relativism. One might call this position transcendental pragmatism.

Keywords

• Fleck
• Kant
• transcendental arguments
• pragmatism
• contextualism