Reading :: Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

by Ludwik Fleck

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a decade, and it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for perhaps a year. But I have been reading some literature about concepts lately, and realized that this book would need to be part of those readings. So when I finally got to a break in my reading schedule, I picked it up, expecting to slog through it. 

Instead, I found a highly readable book that takes the question of developing scientific facts quite seriously. As Thaddeus Trenn says in the preface, this monograph was originally written in 1935 and published with a scant 640 copies, “of which about 200 were sold,” and “indeed, the first published reference to his monograph since the 1930s seems to be that of Kuhn in 1962” (p.xviii). Nearly a lost work, this monograph found a new life in the sociology of science and technology (SST) in the 1970s. 

To me, the book reads as if it had been written in the 1970s. It sounds a lot like SST works that came out at that time and a little later (Shapin, Schaeffer, Woolgar, Latour, Bazerman), following the same basic methodology of examining how scientific concepts change over time through subsequent texts. I’m not sure whether Fleck heavily influenced these texts or whether those texts found Fleck newly relevant because his text resembled theirs — but in any case, the method of investigation was familiar, leading to insights that accorded with what I understand of SST.

In the Prologue, Fleck lays out what’s at stake: “What is a fact?” He answers that “A fact is supposed to be distinguished from transient theories as something definite, permanent, and independent of any subjective interpretation by the scientist.” Epistemology critiques how facts are established, but, Fleck says, epistemology tends to focus exclusively on “well-established facts of everyday life, or those of classical physics” (p.xxvii). He sets off to examine how empirical facts originate, focusing on a “recent” fact: “the fact that the so-called Wasserman reaction is related to syphilis” (p.xxviii). 

In Chapter 1, he examines how the modern concept of syphilis originated. After all, in the 15th century, it was unclear whether a single disease existed (p.2). At that point, the first idea emerged: syphilis was distinguished by spreading from the genitals, and this meant to astrology-based science that it was influenced by the sign of Scorpio (p.2). “Astrology thus contributed its share to the firm establishment of the venereal character of syphilis as its first ‘specific difference’” (p.2), followed by religion’s treatment of syphilis as “a punishment for sinful lust” (p.3). Thus “the stigma of fatefulness and sinfulness was imprinted upon syphilis” (p.3) and became a lasting part of the concept. 

The second idea evolved from nascent medical practice involving pharmaceuticals: syphilis, along with other skin diseases, could be treated by mercury — unlike other venereal diseases such as gonorrhea (pp.3-4). This second idea developed side by side with the first one, and they eventually mingled (p.5). 

Fleck concludes that the fact of syphilis itself emerged from these ideas that we would today consider fallacious; he urges us to pay “attention to the cultural-historical dependence” of epistemic choices (p.9). 

Two other ideas also contributed to this scientific fact. The third idea is that of syphilis as a pathogenetic disease entity — i.e., focused on “the mechanism of the pathological associations” — including foul humours. The fourth idea is that of syphilis as a special etiological entity (p.11).

Eventually, the Wasserman reaction redefined syphilis, created the discipline of serology, and yielded an effective etiological concept of syphiology (p.14). “This completes the present-day (!) definition of syphilis” (p.14). Fleck concludes that the development of the concept of syphilis is incomplete in principle, constituting a transformation from earlier understandings (p.19).

In Chapter 2, Fleck argues that “Concepts are not spontaneously created but are determined by their ‘ancestors’” (p.20). Just as we would not study anatomy without embryology, we should not study “epistemology without historical and comparative investigations” (p.21). Nor can we just rely on phenomenology (p.21)!

Thus, we must study proto-ideas, which influenced the development of scientific facts despite often being based on prescientific ideas (such as astrology) (p.23). The Wasserman reaction, he says, “constitutes the modern, scientific expression of an earlier pre-idea which contributed to the concept of syphilis” (p.23). “Can epistemology blandly ignore the fact that many scientific positions developed from proto-ideas which at the time were not based upon the type of proof considered valid today?” (pp.24-25), he demands. “Proto-ideas must be regarded as developmental rudiments of modern theories and as originating from a socio-cogitative foundation” (p.25). These are “‘mutations’ in thought-style” (p.26). Further, he says, cognition is the result of social activity (p.38), emerging from a “thought collective” or “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction” and which “provides the special ‘carrier’ for the historical development for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture” (p.39, his emphasis). He identifies three factors involved in cognition: “the individual, the collective, and objective reality” (p.40). 

In Chapter 3, Fleck finally tells us what the Wasserman reaction is. I’ll just skip to his point, which is that without a preexisting, prescientific idea of a change in syphilitic blood, there would be no Wasserman test and no serology (p.77).

In Chapter 4, Fleck defines a scientific fact as “a thought-stylized conceptual relation which can be investigated from the point of view of history and from that of psychology, both individual and collective, but which cannot be substantively reconstructed in toto simply from these points of view” (p.83). He describes the mechanism of the scientific experiment in these terms, noting that “cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge” (p.86). He argues that “the general aim of intellectual work is therefore maximum thought constraint with minimum thought caprice” (p.95). and he concludes that a fact arises through (1) a signal of resistance in chaotic initial thinking, leading to (2) a definite thought constraint, yielding (3) a form to be perceived (p.95). Truth is thus a stylized solution: not subjective or relative, but “an event in the history of thought” that is “stylized through constraint” (p.100, his emphasis). And a fact is “the signal of resistance opposing free, arbitrary thinking” (p.101). 

The book ends with a biographical sketch. Fleck earned his medical degree in 1922 and specialized in bacteriology, heading the bacteriological and chemical labs of the State Hospital in Lvov, Poland (p.149). His research work centered on typhus. This book was published in 1935 in Switzerland because conditions did not allow a Jew to publish in Germany at that time (p.150). During the German occupation of Lvov, Fleck was compelled to produce a typhus vaccine for the German armed forces. After divulging the procedure for obtaining the new vaccine, in 1943, he was sent to Auschwitz, where (under duration) he continued to produce the vaccine. In 1944, he was transferred to Buchenwald, where he was again compelled to produce it. Buchenwald was liberated in 1945, and he returned to Poland (p.151). Finally, he was able to emigrate to Israel with his wife in 1957 (p.152). 

Overall, I found this book to be a fascinating, exciting, and highly rewarding reading. Fleck writes clearly and confidently, providing a valuable sociological account that grapples with concepts as culturally and historically emergent, and thus conditioned by (or guided by, or originating from) prescientific ideas. For me, it served a useful contrast to the line of thought that travels from Hegel to Vygotsky to modern-day commentators such as Blunden, in which scientific concepts are sharply distinguished from complexes and pseudoconcepts, emerging through dialectic to yield more accurate and defensible understandings of the world. Fleck doesn’t deny that the modern concept of syphilis is more useful for investigation and more tractable to treatment, but he understands this concept (and other scientific concepts) as pragmatic in relation to current thought and practice, rather than closer to reality in an absolute or objective sense. 

I’m sure I’ll be returning to this book to think about concepts further. If you’re interested in concepts, or just the sociology of science in general, I highly recommend it. 

Reading :: Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace

 Learning Skilled Trades in the Workplace

By Jo Mackiewicz

On p.1, Mackiewicz provides this book’s goal:

How do people develop competence and even expertise across knowledge domains? This chapter introduces the goal of the book: to relate my journey toward the breadth as well as depth of competences required by work in a repair and metal fabrication shop.

As Mackiewicz points out, workplace studies — and certainly workplace writing studies — have tended to focus on white-collar work. But people also learn, communicate, and write in the trades. Unfortunately, very few workplace writing studies focus on the trades (I can think of just three off the top of my head, including this one). But this is real work, using real communication practices, involving real learning with real consequences. So I’m really glad to see this book.

The book is an autoethnography. That is, Mackiewicz describes her own experience joining a culture and community by joining a fabrication shop as a part-time welder. (Her previous book, which I haven’t read, describes learning how to weld in trade school.) By reflecting on her own experiences and connecting them to the literature of situated practice and communities of practice, Mackiewicz helps us to understand on-the-job learning practices at this shop. Different chapters examine the learning context, practicing, mistakes, health and safety, tech drawings and shop genres, and how gender affects engaging in the learning community. Throughout, Mackiewicz draws on many, many stories — both her own and those of others she interviewed — to make her points. 

Through this work, I gained a better understanding of what it means to be a welder, to learn to solve problems like a welder, and to apply learning abductively to different challenges. The fabrication shop involved wildly different problems and constraints, so constant problem-solving and expertise pooling are paramount. Consequently, regular routines and fixed procedures take a back seat to improvisation. 

So I think the book is a real contribution. But it does have drawbacks as well.

The first is, I think, inherent to autoethnographies. Autoethnography is a tough genre because the writer is a sort of stand-in for a broader set of people who enter into the learning community. It’s easy for an autoethnographer to slip into “me-search,” i.e., just talking about their own experiences as if they are inherently interesting, making themselves the main character. To her credit, Mackiewicz doesn’t fall into this trap. But she avoids it by instead making the hero the shop owner, Jim Howe (she uses the owner’s real name and real shop name throughout). This is an understandable move, but it puts her in the position of not being able to critique shop practices in a thoroughgoing way. Consequently, she spends a lot of time talking about her own mistakes, which she owns, and how Howe patiently corrects them. Reading her account, however, I perceive a different story: Howe is a good man and a skilled welder, but not necessarily a skilled supervisor, instructor, or business owner. In many cases, Mackiewicz decides to try completing a job without bothering Howe for guidance, then makes mistakes, then is grateful for Howe’s patient correction. After the third or fourth such story, I started to think more about the community of practice (CoP) Howe had set up, one in which all of his welders (not just Mackiewicz) were reluctant to bother him with requests for guidance. This CoP yields more unclear tasks, more mistakes, more work and materials in remediating these mistakes. Did it result in better learning? Or did it result in more uncertainty and set welders into a dynamic in which they had to own any mistakes, but attribute any successes to Howe and his training? I wanted to see a more textured treatment of the CoP, but since Howe’s real name was used, I don’t think that more textured treatment would be possible in print — it would be potentially damaging and certainly ungracious to Mackiewicz’ host. Caught in this trap, the book ends up shying away from a more insightful diagnosis of the shop — or at least that’s my reading. 

The second drawback is a story problem. Qualitative research write-ups, and especially ethnographies and autoethnographies, are typically stories. But those stories have to coordinate two story lines: What happened and what it meant. Here, Mackiewicz prioritizes what happened: She selects specific topics (e.g., the learning context, practicing, mistakes, health and safety, tech drawings and shop genres, and how gender affects engaging in the learning community), makes them the chapters, then tells stories within each topic, applying theory as she goes — which localizes what it meant to each chapter. The result is fragmentary, making theory local to each chapter; we get a series of drive-by citations to theory rather than an overarching theoretical story with broader development that we can apply to other cases in the trades. Typically such studies have an early chapter that lays out the theoretical framework so we can understand how each chapter contributes to this overall theory story, with a conclusion that pulls everything together; here, we don’t get the early chapter, and the conclusion summarizes rather than providing a unified framework. So, in the end, the book felt episodic rather than like a complete story. 

I’ve spent some time on what I think are the book’s drawbacks because as I read it, I was trying to articulate what it was missing. But those drawbacks should not obscure what the book achieves: a rare study of learning in the trades, a study with a great deal of lived detail. If you’re interested in how people learn in communities of practice, and especially in the trades, and even more especially with a writing focus, you should definitely pick up this book. 

Reading :: How Things Shape the Mind

 How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement

By Lambros Malafouris

I was recently introduced to Malafouris’ work through an interdisciplinary reading group, and was so intrigued that I immediately bought and read the book. Malafouris is a cognitive archaeologist, and has become dissatisfied with how archaeology treats material artifacts as traces of human minds. For nonarchaeologists, let’s set this up with a case that Malafouris treats later in the book, and one that readers of this blog will find familiar: The origins of Sumerian writing.

According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat, archaeologists had long found clay “tokens” in their digs of ancient Mesopotamia. These tokens were small (they would easily fit in a palm) and regularly shaped, initially in simple shapes such as balls, tetrahedrons, and cylinders, and eventually in more elaborate shapes. Sometimes the more elaborate shapes were pierced. Occasionally they were found inside “envelopes,” or hollow balls, sort of like piñatas.

Archaeologists spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what these tokens were. Were they game pieces? Toys? Materials used in worship? 

Eventually, Schmandt-Besserat realized that some envelopes had impressions on the outside, and those impressions matched the tokens inside the envelope. Based on this insight and much more investigation, she developed a theory: The tokens were counters, used to track debt. They were a hacked-together accounting system, probably carrying on an earlier innovation of using pebbles or seeds for correspondence counting. To keep debts together, Sumerians began putting them in clay envelopes. But they found it useful to see what was in the envelope before breaking it, so they began to impress each token on the outside of the envelope before dropping it in. And soon they realized that if the impressions were on the outside, they didn’t really need to put tokens on the inside — so they invented the tablet and began imitating these impressions with a stylus. Writing had emerged, perhaps for the first time in the world (although some believe it emerged first in Egypt).

We are now highly literate, and often when we are faced with a problem, we reach for a textual solution. So it’s worth remembering that for about 98% of our time as a species, we didn’t have writing. It’s not easy to remember that — after all, parents read to their children shortly after they are born, and sometimes even when they are in the womb, and we are born into a world suffused with texts. So it’s hard for us to imagine worlds without writing, and it’s hard not to project our cognitive experiences onto the archaeological materials we find. Malafouris’ mission in this book is to sketch out an interdisciplinary analytical framework — Material Engagement Theory (MET) — that can help us rethink the boundaries of the mind by examining materiality in cognitive terms (p.2). His central question is: “How do things shape the mind?” (p.2). 

He draws on some of the people you would expect — Hutchins, Clark, Latour — to address this question by “taking material culture seriously” by “being systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of things in the enactment and constitution of human cognition” (p.8). To do this, he takes a dialectical approach, but with “some important differences”: “minds and things are continuous and interdefinable processes rather than isolated and independent entities,” and thus, “we need a way to penetrate the specific cultural, social, and developmental dynamics through which these connections are effected and sustained, as well as an efficient way to describe the cognitive properties that arise from the co-constitution of people and things” (p.9). Hence MET.

In fact, he argues, in general archaeologists have ignored mind-world interaction (p.12); the problem is that they then assume they know how the mind works, yielding an implicitly internalist account. In contrast, he argues, understanding material culture leads to understanding the human mind and vice versa (p.13).

MET questions Cartesianism and contests “the artificial line between persons and things, or between mind and the material world,” which (among other things) has “blinded philosophy and the cognitive sciences to the pervasive, diachronic influence, and the transformative potential, of things in human life and cognition” p.15). Thus, even if modern-day archaeologists take a relational viewpoint, they can’t or won’t follow the implications or understand how these implications work out in practice (p.15). 

Malafouris introduces the notion of material semiosis: “the material sign does not primarily embody a communicative or representational logic but an enactive one. For material semiosis meaning is not a product of representation; it is a product or process of conceptual integration between material and conceptual domains” (p.18). 

MET “seeks to describe and explain long-term change, particularly the processes by which human cognitive abilities grow, transform, and change.” Unlike conventional cognitive archaeology, it “is not concerned with the task of associating specific human abilities with specific time periods and pre-fixed evolutionary stages.” Instead, “MET primarily asks about the what, the why, and the how — for example: What is symbolic thinking? Why and how did symbolism emerge? What forms of signification count as symbolic meta-representational thinking?” (p.38). He argues that human beings inherit, not a mind, but the ability to develop a mind (p.42; cf. Leontiev). 

MET is interested in metaplasticity: an analytic unit that integrates different temporalities (p.43). In this understanding, “the brain is as much a cultural artifact as a biological entity,” one that “emerges as a dynamic co-evolutionary process of deep enculturation and material engagement” rather than a biological constant (p.45). Metaplasticity, he says, may be the locus of human uniqueness (p.46). (NB, Leontiev or Vygotsky might argue that to reach full potential, the mind must integrate the right cultural tools; in contrast, Bakhtin might argue for heteroglossia, in which different cultural tools enable different potentialities and understandings.) MET is interested in “mechanisms that mediate those plastic changes, not at the level of the individual, but at the systemic level of enculturation and social practice” (p.50). 

MET has three working hypotheses:

• the extended mind
• the enacted sign
• material agency (p.51). 

He elaborates on these in Ch.4-6. 

In Ch.4, on the extended mind, Malafouris considers the case of Linear B. Here, he argues that cognition was enacted through the tablets (p.68); he raises the question of how they were thnking rather than what they were thinking (p.69) — that is, he reads Linear B through a distributed cognition approach. In this reading, he argues for a “constitutive intertwining of cognition with material culture” in which “material culture is potentially co-extensive and consubstantial with mind” (p.77, his emphasis). He argues that, in examining “the material remains of the Linear B script, we are not simply looking at a disembodied system of signs. We are looking, instead, at a temporal sequence of relationally constituted embodied processes encompassing reciprocal and culturally orchestrated interactions among humans, situated tool use, and space” (p.78). Linear B provides an “extended reorganization of the cognitive system,” not just a memory aid but a reconstruction (p.81; cf. Salomon on khipu). 

In Ch.5, he examines the semiotic dimension of MET, which goes beyond representation (p.89). He argues that “material semiosis” is enactive, not the product of representation so much as the process of conceptual integration between material and conceptual domains (p.90). Unlike Peirce’s account of semiosis, Malafouris is concerned with how the sign emerges (p.96): He argues that “the material sign, in most cases, does not stand for a concept but rather substantiates a concept,” i.e., instantiation (p.97). “Indeed, a material sign as an expressive sign does not refer to something existing separately from it, but is a constitutive part of what it expresses and which otherwise cannot be known. It operates on the principle of participation rather than that of symbolic equivalency” (p.97). He illustrates his points with the Sumerian tokens I mentioned earlier in this review, specifically examining how the concept of numbers emerged from number sense (the sense that two tokens are more than one, for instance) (p.112). These tokens, he argues, were “enactive material proto-signs,” and when they were pressed onto clay envelopes, “two additional semiotic properties became active within this extended cognitive system”: indexicality (the tokens were physically connected with their impressions) and iconicity (the 3D tokens became 2D markings) (p.114). And

 

One could argue that … the vague structure of a very difficult and inherently meaningless conceptual process (counting), by being integrated via projection with the stable material structure of the clay tokens, was gradually transformed into an easier perceptual and semiotic problem. However, perceptual problems can be directly manipulated and manually resolved in real time and space. Thus, the process of counting, as an embodied and mediated act, became meaningful. The clay tokens brought forth the numbers by making the manipulation of their properties visible and tangible. (pp.114-115)

That is, the tokens transformed and simplified the problem of numbers, “thereby enabling the building of neural connections that otherwise couldn’t be built” (p.116). More importantly, “it takes care of a part of the problem by itself, thus becoming an inseparable part of what is now an extended system of numerical cognition reaching beyond the brain and into the world” (p.116). Malafouris concludes that “Meaning does not reside in the material sign; it emerges from the various parameters of its performance and usage as these are actualized in the process of engagement. … Meaning is the temporally emergent property of material engagement, the ongoing blending between the mental and the physical. In the case of material signs, we do not read meaningful symbols; we meaningfully engage meaningless symbols” (p.117). Those who follow this blog may see the relevance of this line of thought to the question that Vygotsky and Leontiev addressed: are tools and signs separate, or can they be collapsed? Vygotsky (at least during his instrumental period) saw a sharp distinction between the two, while Leontiev collapsed the two into a single category of mediators, mediators oriented to the category of activity. I think what Malafouris offers here is a collapsed view, more similar to Leontiev’s, but with a genuine attempted account of semiosis. 

In Chapter 6, we get to material agency. Malafouris takes a Leontievan view here: “If there is such a thing as human agency, then there is material agency; there is no way human and material agency can be disentangled” (p.119, his emphasis). That is, agency and intentionality are “properties of material engagement” rather than of humans or things alone (p.119). Drawing on Latour’s sociotechnical graphs (STGs), he argues that (a) the medium is the message; (b) closure involves network before meaning; and (c) we can’t reduce an engagement to a single prime mover (or agent) (pp.126-130). MET argues for material agency without resorting to anthropomorphism (p.130). Drawing from Dreyfus, he distinguishes between “R-intentionality” (i.e., representationally mediated intentionality) and “G-intentionality” (i.e., gestalt intentionality) (p.142) — which I think is parallel to Latour’s discussion of intentionality using guns as an example. “In the case of ‘G-intentionality’ the line between human intention and material affordance becomes all the more difficult to draw,” he says (p.143): “the mediational potential of a certain artifact shapes … the nature of human intentions” (p.143). However, Malafouris disagrees with Latour’s solution of bypassing existing language games (p.145), instead arguing that we “follow Gell and adopt an anthropological perspective” (p.146).

With this background, Malafouris brings us to the next section: “Marking the Mental: Where Brain, Body, and Culture Conflate.” Chapter 7 focuses on knapping, which Malafouris argues is a cognitive act (p.164): we can “see early stone tools as enactive cognitive prostheses capable of transforming and extending the cognitive architecture of our hominin ancestors” (p.164). This means questioning the conventional belief that the finished artifact was the intended one — the finished artefact fallacy (p.171). He quotes Davidson and Noble, who proposed that the Acheulian hand axe was actually “the unintended residual core left after successive removal of flakes” (p.171). In Chapter 8, he discusses early marks and lines in objects such as ochre pieces and ostrich egg shells, sugggesting that “these early marks and lines do not externalize anything but the very process of externalization” (p.180) — that is, these marks did not necessarily begin as representations. Instead, mark making was “an active prosthetic perceptual means of making sense. That is, marks will be treated as enactive projections” (p.180). They are like scribbles that eventually self-organize (p.193). 

In Chapter 9, Malafouris considers agency in pottery-making. He claims that Latour “rediscovered” mediation as developed by Vygotsky and activity theorists (p.221 — I’m pretty sure this is not correct, since Latour doesn’t cite the Vygotsky Circle and his notion of mediation is quite different). He draws on Law and Mol when discussing agency in pottery, in which “the purity of action has been lost” because the body is situated within the material action of pottery making (p.221). 

Overall, I found this book to be really insightful, and it give me some conceptual tools for thinking through issues I’ve been trying to disentange. Specifically, I appreciated how this account helped me to think further through tool vs sign mediation and why I have reservations about semiotic explanations of mediation. And I really appreciated the illustrative cases. 

On the other hand, I wanted to see more discussion of how the antecedent theories (ANT, distributed and enactive cognition, Vygotskian theory) interacted so that I could understand what he was and wasn’t incorporating into MET. 

If you’re interested in semiosis, materiality, distributed cognition, and similar topics, definitely pick this book up.