Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Work)

Fleck's sole book-length work is one of the most important and least read texts in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Through a meticulous case study of how the medical understanding of syphilis evolved over centuries, Fleck demonstrated that scientific facts are not discovered but generated — that they come into being through historically situated, socially organized processes of collective negotiation. The book introduced the concepts of thought collective, thought style, proto-idea, and the distinction between provisional journal knowledge and settled handbook knowledge. It was ignored on publication, rediscovered after Thomas Kuhn acknowledged its influence on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and now reads as uncannily prescient for a moment in which AI has made the social construction of scientific facts unusually observable.