Ludwik Fleck's Roles in Society: A Case Study Using Joseph Ben-David's Paradigm for a Sociology of Knowledge

In his early writings, the late Joseph Ben-David put forward a model accounting for certain kinds of cases of the emergence of new disciplines. We argue that Ben-David's explanations fall squarely within the sociology of knowledge — and, in fact, have many points in common with explanations in the tradition of the `strong programme' in that discipline. Specifically, Ben-David's central theoretical concept — that of `role hybridization' — overlaps the notion of `multifunctionality' of theories. Ben-David's approach is superior to that of the `strong programme' in as much as, being hermeneutical and not causal, it avoids the dangers usually besetting the sociology of knowledge — notably relativism.

In the second part of the paper we analyze the emergence of Ludwik Fleck's ideas and — using Ben-David's model — we relate them to the social context within which Fleck was working. We show that social conditions induced the outsider bacteriologist Fleck to adopt a strategy of role-hybridization. This strategy gave rise to `idea-hybridizations' which led to his original, multifunctional theory of scientific growth.