In my graduate course Writing for Electronic Communities (WEC), I was reading one of my peer’s comments on a book we were required to read for class discussion: Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Factand felt the need to respond to a question she posted on her blog. The student, called A Graduate’s Journey Towards Domestication, wrote:
“1. On page 27, to help promote thought style in a progressive direction, Fleck address what we do wrong: “(1) A contradiction to the system appears unthinkable. (2) What does not fit into the system remains unseen; (3) alternatively, if it is noticed, either it is kept secret, or (4) laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not contradict the system. (5) Despite the legitimate claims of contradictory views, one tends to see, describe, or even illustrate those circumstances which corroborate current views and thereby give them substance.” It seems that the solution to our thought process is to always assume that a formed belief is wrong. Can a member of the thought collective who contributed to developing the formed belief also be a member of the thought collective who assumes a formed belief is wrong in order to challenge it from a different angle? So why then, on page 85, does Fleck contradict this progressive idea when he writes, “[All really valuable experiments are] uncertain, incomplete, and unique. And when experiments become certain, precise, and reproducible at any time, they no longer are necessary for research purposes proper but function only for demonstration or ad hoc determinations,” and if no more experimenting is required, then how do we know that we have found a fact? Because it no longer needs to be researched? But it seems that Fleck said to never trust a fact as fact because it might only be fact today until we learn more about it tomorrow.”
My response:
I think the general idea of what Fleck is trying to say is that we should not resist change, that there will always be some element of our knowledge that needs to be analyzed or adapted. Knowledge can never really become redundant; it needs to be dynamic, to redefine itself continually. The problem instead seems to lay with us, those doing the research. We become complacent with our knowledge; we like to believe that we have attained the goal, the final answer. Look at the research conducted on HIV/AIDS and Breast Cancer. It is an eternal race to find the cure, but what we maybe haven’t taken into consideration is that we live in a world where adaptation is the mode of survival, not just biologically but in every aspect of the learning process. The knowledge we gain today may be useless tomorrow, so we need to continually expand, test and rethink the boundaries of our evaluations of the facts around us.
While both of the topics Fleck mentions stem from an interrelated discussion, that of developing an awareness of the process of learning new ideas, I don’t think that the two quotes from page 27 and 85 necessarily contradict one another; they could stand on their own as separate entities, but also work well on one continuum of thought. On page 27 Fleck is describing the human condition that seems to perpetuate whenever we are forced to accept new knowledge. Once we are certain that something is a fact, we, as a species, are bound and determined to cling onto the existing idea, resistant to change and the implications of change itself.
As Fleck states, “Once a structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many details and relations has been formed, it offers enduring resistance to anything that contradicts it.” For example, look at how geocentric humans were for thousands of years. Aristotle and Ptolemy declared Earth as the center of the universe, the Sun, planets and stars circled around us; Earth was a stationary being. This idea was supported by various other Greek, Roman, Islamic and Chinese scientists and philosophers for hundreds of years. Why bother to question a well known fact? They had their rationalizations and explanations all set up and no one could break through their resistance of the fact that Earth was the center of the Universe. That is, not until Copernicus.
In 1543 the scientific fact of geocentricism met its first resistance with the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.Copernicus’ work detailed how the Earth and the other planets actually revolved around the Sun. This contradictory idea was met with the type of reaction Fleck describes on page 25; it was explained away by scientists, who were reluctant and set in their ways, believing rather in their geocentric model which had already been painstakingly established. However, as Fleck describe on page 87, this is not the end of the process. For a study to have worth, it needs to have unexplained answers and problems wrong with the existing data. Obviously the Earth was not the epicenter of the Universe. Copernicus did as Fleck describes on page 84, which is that “it is important first of all to learn to observe and ask questions properly,” – Copernicus questioned the facts, asked questions about the position of the planets, Sun position and orbital patterns, all of which led him to a new conclusion. It was this break away from the stagnant learning process of just accepting the known norm that set about new discoveries for man kind, leading to work from the likes of Sir Issac Newton.
Like a chain reaction, questioning known facts leads not to a redundancy of old information, but instead it changes the perception of that information, making it not the final ‘answer’ but merely a step or a building block to the next question/answers. In this sense, a fact is not obsolete; it is instead a bundle of knowledge with the potential to lead you to new areas of intelligence and comprehension.Fleck’s book then, becomes more of a study of human behavior than that of knowledge. Our learning patterns, our psychology, our political conventions and social structure all dictate and influence what we learn. In the WEC class, group members are completing Usability Projects, which encourages us to take the ‘known’, Rowan University’s Website, and pick it apart. We are doing what Fleck insists a worthy study does - we are questioning, we are studying, we are looking for new answers to improve and replace the old ones. In essence, as a class, we are breaking away from the norm of accepting what already exists and are replacing rationalization and resistance with inquisitive research: we are (albeit sometimes reluctantly) Copernicus’ in action.
