Ways and dynamics of reception of Ludwik Fleck’s work in the social sciences

On the hermeneutics of reception

Since the meaning of the received work may exist only in the diversity of its re-contextualizing interpretations, there is no demarcation line to be drawn between ‘works only of a historical interest’ and ‘works with actual importance’ for current research. This claim does not imply relativism about the work’s meaning and significance. It merely states that the latter are not inherent in the work’s structure, but are to be sought in the whole of the (potentially open-ended) effective history of the work’s reception. Yet the process of reception does not consist only of reading and interpretation. It also has an important dimension of application: One is applying the received work to an actual (for the recipient) context of inquiry that becomes revealed by the very process of reception. Each particular re-contextualizing interpretation is always already a contextual application of what gets received and read. The received work has effective-historical existence (wirkungsgeschichtliches Sein) through the way in which it manages to change the tradition of the recipient. In the rest of this article I attempt to spell out this claim.

Let me begin by touching upon the central doctrine of the hermeneutics of reception, already mentioned in passing: a contextualizing interpretation in the process of reception obligatorily involves a moment of innovative implementation of the recipient program’s principles. This implementation goes hand in hand with a re-contextualizing application of the received work. (For the sake of illustration, imagine a research program in historiography of medicine that, by applying Fleck’s ideas about thought styles to its subjects of inquiry, manages to implement its principles in a new subject of investigation – say, the historical event of a re-description of clinical symptoms attributed to an unknown disease in terms of a special class of endocrinal diseases as a result of a historical change in the research group’s thought style. The historiographical program extends its area of validity by including a new subject. At the same time, Fleck’s received work becomes re-contextualized and applied to a new context of study – a context that was not on the horizon of possibilities when Fleck developed his ideas.) Fleck’s ideas are received in various research traditions and research programs. They have enjoyed interpretations from diverse viewpoints. Being read in light of theoretical principles of a wide spectrum of recipient traditions and programs, Fleck’s social epistemology, comparative cognitive sociology, the doctrine of thought styles as well as his scattered views about intellectual history (most of all the view of the role of pre-ideas in the formation of scientific theories) have been applied to various new contexts that were not intended in the formation of his work. Thus, there is a kind of symmetry between the recipient program’s innovative implementation and the received work’s re-contextualizing application.

The reception within a research tradition or a program is subjected to the aim of opening a new context in which the recipient’s programmatic principles are to be applied. The reception is not a pragmatically neutral act: It is accomplished with the intention to promote an extension (and/or modification) of the recipient program (tradition). Applying the received ideas to a new context brings into being at the same time a new aspect of their historical significance. By the same token, the original work acquires new meanings and significance in its application to a new territory. Thus extended through its re-contextualization, the work may provoke on its part a further challenge to the recipient program. More specifically, its re-contextualized ideas promise to promote such a reflexivity (within the recipient program) that might prompt one not only to look for new contexts of the program’s implementation but to bring into focus the very horizon of possible applicability of the program. To sum up, there is in the process of recep-tion an interplay of the recipient program’s contextualized implementations and re-contextualizing of the interpretations (applications) of what is received. This interplay is the kernel of the effective history of reception. As a rule, the mutual reinforcement is not a unilinear process, but follows various trajectories.

Interestingly enough, the more loosely the original work has been theoretically codified, the more extensive (and in some cases also intensive) its subsequent effective-historical reception. ² Martina Schlünder makes this correlation when, in countering Harwood’s view, she makes the case that the vague and inexact concepts of Fleck’s epistemology (and even the inconsistencies in his doctrines) are especially appropriate to the study of elusive scientific objects’ formation and circulation in various (scientific and non-scientific) practices. In Schlünder’s case such objects are sexuality, fertility, and reproduction. They are not only ‘scattered over’ configurations of practices of different sorts, but also occupy topoi located at the nature–culture interface. Fleck’s ‘incongruous theories’ provide the contours of an epistemological approach to disciplines that are dealing with heterogeneous Zwischenräume populated with hybrid natural–artificial entities (Schlünder, 2005: 59). Moreover, she argues that precisely because of its conceptual ambiguities, Fleck’s work was flexible enough to sustain the enduring latent period until its rediscovery, and to become not only integrated in the new epistemological landscape but capable of impelling further research as well. In a similar vein, Patrick Heelan (1986: 294) observes that ‘Fleck’s own philosophical work is not sufficiently rich in content or background allusions to fix unambiguously the philosophical tradition within which he was working or within which preferably he is to be read’. But if Fleck was preoccupied with working out a theory of fuzzy and inexact knowledge – a theory that remains necessarily without precise logical structure and clearly delineated conceptuality – and if he was not engaged with a definite philosophical position, then his epistemological project ought to be reconstructed by means of an approach that operates with a similar structural identity and a congruent conceptuality. Otherwise, the reconstruction would impose an alien logical and conceptual structure upon his project.

This claim is advocated convincingly in an interpretation of his work that also belongs to the first wave of Fleck’s reception: In using Ben-David’s hermeneutic paradigm for the sociology of knowledge (as opposed to the causal models of the strong program) – a paradigm that favors an analysis from the actor’s point of view – Freudenthal and Löwy (1988) inaugurated a line of contextualizing interpretations that bind up Fleck’s holism and ambiguous conceptuality with the marginality of his socio-professional settings. Hermeneutic versions of cognitive sociology subsequently developed within this line of sociological reception. For Freudenthal and Löwy, Fleck’s conceptuality is necessarily heterogeneous and multivalent since, because of his failure to become integrated within any academic community, he hybridized the role of scientist (clinical bacteriologist and immunologist) with the roles of historian of medicine and philosopher (comparative epistemologist). As a result, his hybrid ideas acquired, at the end of the 1930s, a multifunctional character, being addressed to different reference groups. No doubt the proliferation of recipient academic communities of Fleck’s work in the last two decades is due also to this multifunctionality. With this observation in mind, I am going to specify further the theory of effective-historical reception as it is used in the remainder of this article.

This theory differs significantly from another hermeneutic conception developed in the historiography of scientific ideas, namely Hélène Metzger’s conception of the empathic congeniality between the historian and the impersonal worldview that provides the original contextualization of the ideas she/he studies. To be sure, Metzger is guided in her epistemological considerations about science’s historical dynamics by a version of the hermeneutic circle – a co-interpretative circularity between epistemological assumptions of the historiographical method and the historical data of science’s development (Freudenthal, 1990: 181). Yet, in my view, this version of the hermeneutic circle does not characterize science’s historicity in an appropriate manner. It instead refers to the methodology of the historiographical investigation that has to retain the historical authenticity of what is studied. The aim in applying this methodology is to reproduce (albeit in a de-personalized way) the creative process in its own historical context. This is a conception developed under the aegis of the same kind of historicism that 20th-century philosophical hermeneutics tried (I dare to say successfully) to overcome. In Metzger’s perspective, each historical situation in the development of science is regarded as constituting its own world of scientific objects and regimes of knowledge, which presumably is incommensurable with both the worlds preceding it and those coming after it. Only the historian’s empathic and congenial understanding (of distant traditions and worldviews) might surmount the historical worlds’ incommensurability. By contrast, the interpretative theory of the effective-historical reception (of a theoretical work) I am following here is under the aegis of the hermeneutic-philosophical alternative to historicism.

The task of this theory is not to supply the recipient with effective procedures of (methodologically better) understanding and interpretation. Furthermore, it does not aim at achieving the presumable authenticity of what is interpreted. The theory of effective-historical reception has instead to clarify how the particular contextual reception becomes historically situated by the recipient’s prejudices, fore-conceptions, and expectations as they have been informed by traditions and cultural life-worlds. Phrased differently, how does this reception become an event in the received work’s effective-historical being? From a transcendental point of view, the recipient’s ‘fore-structures of understanding and interpretation’ are conditions for the possibility of the work’s reception. Yet these conditions are by no means located in the recipient’s consciousness. (Moreover, they are not at her/his personal disposal. The recipient may only – through reflexivity – achieve acquaintance with them by asking critically what the traditions are in which she/he passively or intentionally participates.) The conditions are generated by the very process of reception, which always already transcends both the subjectivity of the work’s author and the subjectivity of the recipient, thereby proving to be a trans-subjective process. For the process of reception at once situates the work’s particular understanding and interpretation, and transcends the situation of a particular receptive contextualization, the transcendental conditions it involves are conditions of the reception’s ‘situated transcendence’. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989: 304–306) addresses the latter by making use of the celebrated metaphor of ‘fusion of horizons’. It is this fusion that makes reception of a work a dialogical process. The task of the recipient is twofold. On the one hand, she has to disclose a historical horizon from which the work being interpreted should be let speak as much as possible with its authentic voice. On the other hand, the work is to be embedded in the horizon of the recipient’s interests, expectations, and anticipations. Again, both horizons are projected not by the author’s and the recipient’s mental life, but by the traditions in which they are involved. The horizons do not remain indifferent to one another. They actively interact in the work’s contextualizing interpretation, thereby bringing into being the work’s historicity as a past–present ongoing unity. It is this interaction for which the fusion metaphor proves to be relevant. However, irrespective of the intensity of the interaction between past and present horizons, the process of reception never becomes enclosed in a unified (totally homogenized) horizon. There is always a residual tension between the fusing horizons that brings into play new interpretative questions in the effective history of the work’s reception.

Through the fusion of horizons the interpretation of a work ceases to be a merely reproductive undertaking and becomes a productive activity. In recapitulating my previous discussion, I single out two aspects of this activity: A contextual reception is at once an interpretative reconstitution of the received work, and a creative revision of the recipient tradition. Unfolding these aspects in terms of philosophical hermeneutics is directed against (a) hermeneutic intentionalism and (b) objectivist-normative reconstruction, respectively.

(a) The doctrine of hermeneutic intentionalism states that it is impossible to detach the meaning of a text from the author’s intention, which supposedly determines it. The successful reconstruction of this intention is the only criterion (and guarantee) of the validity of the recipient’s interpretation. Had one failed to do this, one would have to impose her own meaning on what is textually received. There is no room in hermeneutic intentionalism for ‘autonomous meaning’ of the received work predicated on its own historicity. Since the received text’s meaning is always – so the argument goes – in the land of consciousness, mentalism proves to be insurmountable in the hermeneutic theory of textual works’ reception. Against this background, Eric D. Hirsch, the main champion of hermeneutic intentionalism in literary theory, introduces the distinction between meaning (the textually embodied intention) and significance (the critically reconstituted meaning by a recipient). Presuming the primacy of the subject–object ontology is indispensable to this way of distinguishing between meaning and significance. In making sense of the concept of the readability of a work through reference to the author’s ‘semantic intentions’, Hirsch grounds this distinction on a kind of Cartesian dualism in his later work.

By contrast, the theory of interpretative reception, which appeals to the primacy of the trans-subjective fusion of horizons, addresses the meaning–significance distinction as something that takes place within the work’s interpretative re-contextualization. The meaning as well as the significance, which hinges on the new implementation of the recipient program, are constituted in the dialogical event of reception, which consists in the work’s ongoing re-contextualization. In this regard, it is not the meaning of a text that goes beyond the author’s intention. Such a formulation still presumes that there is a text’s meaning-as-mere-presence. A genuine alternative to hermeneutic intentionalism admits that the meaning of a textual work is always already in the work’s effective history of reception. The ongoing re-contextualization of the received work is the land of its meaning (and significance) – a land that is outside the author’s as well as the recipient’s consciousness.

What I am following here is not exactly Gadamer’s critique of hermeneutic intentionalism. More specifically, one adds the claim of dialogical reflexivity to the claims that (i) the interpretative reception (and re-contextualization) of a work belongs to the work’s effective-historical being, and (ii) the author’s intention is transcended by (and isolable from) the tradition of a work’s receptions. The interpreter/recipient is not passively involved/immersed in the trans-subjective fusion of horizons. Re-contextualization is a dialogue via reflexivity. I have in mind a recipient’s reflexivity that is indispensable in handling the issue of how the received work opens itself up to possible contextual receptions, possessing at the same time the capability of allowing some of these receptions to come into being and of ruling out others. There is an intrinsic resistance of the received work against its reception/interpretation in a context that would distort it. The received work-in-its-historicity constrains its contextual receptions. It can never select a definite range of such receptions, but it is always able to constrain its interpretative contextualization. With regard to the work’s ‘bearableness of re-contextualization’, the recipient is constantly provoked in her interpretation to question whether the re-contextualization in which she becomes involved is admissible by the work’s effective-historical being (or, alternatively, whether the ‘fusion of horizons’ can take place in the particular contextual reception). It is this constant provocation that requires the recipient’s dialogical reflexivity.

(b) The doctrine of the effective history of reception is designed to offer a full-fledged alternative to the methodologies of objectivist-normative historiographical reconstructions, which seek to free the recipient from prejudices (and, accordingly, from the horizons of the recipient traditions). The ontological priority of the trans-subjectively fused horizons over the work’s self-sufficiency in its original historical context and the recipient’s situatedness implies that the recipient does not reconstruct normatively and objectively (from a ‘meta-historical position’) the work’s meaning and significance. By projecting her horizon of understanding and interpretation, the recipient becomes integrated in the effective history of reception. As a recipient her interpretation belongs to the historicity of the work’s reception (and by implication, to the work’s historicity itself). This belongingness specifies further the status of reception qua a meaningful reconstitution. To hold that reception as a reconstitution takes place in a tradition does not amount to claiming that the tradition is already laid down as a fixed framework. ³ The fusion of horizons reconstitutes not only the received work but also the tradition whose horizon of interpretation is projected in the process of reception. By implication, the recipient is in a dialogical relationship not only with the historically distant work she/he interprets but with her/his own interpretative tradition as well. The tradition does not remain passive. It gets challenged and revised in each particular contextualizing reading of the received work. The recipient’s dialogical participation in the tradition reconstitutes the latter to the extent the tradition enables the recipient to carry out the desired re-contextualizing interpretation of the work. This is why all traditions involved in the effective-historical reception are constantly in statu nascendi.

The temporal distance between a recipient and a received work in the process of reception plays a crucial role for the success of a contextualizing interpretation. In criticizing ‘the naïve assumption of historicism’, Gadamer argues that this distance in the process of reception is not something that must be overcome. The recipient should not attempt to transpose herself into the milieu in which the received work has been produced, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. For Gadamer, the recipient has to recognize temporal distance as a productive condition enabling the desired contextualizing interpretation. ⁴ It is also a positive condition for the recipient’s dual dialogue – with her own tradition and with the distant work. With respect to works of art, Gadamer writes that only ‘when all their relations to the present time have faded away can their real nature appear, so that the understanding of what is said in them can claim to be authoritative and universal’ (1989: 297).

In the case of the reception of a historically distant theoretical work, this observation has to be essentially specified. The work’s relations to the present ought not to be effaced since the work should still show its actuality. Yet a prerequisite for a non-trivial (i.e. not reducible to a formal gesture) and productive reception is that the work’s re-actualization (or the renewal of its actuality) ought to take place in a milieu that basically differs from the original historical context of the work’s formation and initial application. In other words, a prerequisite for a genuine reception of a theoretical work is the break in the effective history of its readings. The fact that the work might have been forgotten (de-actualized) testifies to the occurrence of such a break. Thus, the temporal distance in the reception of a theoretical work is not to be measured chronologically. It hinges rather on the ruptures in the effective history of the work’s readings. In saying this, I leave aside the question of whether the work has been untimely created or has been from the very outset characterized by a contemporary actuality. The term ‘re-actualization’ is used in philosophical hermeneutics to cover both cases.

The temporal distance in the reception of a theoretical work serves a ‘filtering function’ on both sides of the reception process. On the side of the work, this distance eliminates those contingences of the original historical milieu that have distorted the work’s meaning and contributed to an initial misunderstanding of its true significance. On the side of the recipient, the temporal distance helps one to distinguish the ‘true prejudices’ that are necessary (as a fore-conception of reading) for the success of the intended contextualizing interpretation from the ‘false prejudices’ that lead to misunderstanding. Only when one is able to comprehend this work as a whole, detaching it from the historically immediate evaluation of its import, can one begin to approach its meaning and significance. It is hard to imagine a theoretical legacy of the past to which this hermeneutic (effective-historical) claim might have been more pertinent than the work of Ludwik Fleck.

Political contexts in the reception of Fleck’s work

The initial reception of Fleck’s work was a failure not only in terms of deficiencies of its interpretation; the politically inappropriate context in which the work was placed is a far worse aspect of its reception than these deficiencies. In other words, the initial reception was predicated not (so much) on a misunderstanding but first and foremost on a wrong contextualization. Fleck was praised (by the reviewers of his book) for his efforts to develop a relativist epistemology of science that joined the ‘new German style of thought’ (an expression coined by a reviewer), which denies the objectivist–absolutist claim for the allegedly presuppositionless character of scientific research. In a further step, some of the reviewers appealed to the integration of ‘racial factors’ in Fleck’s scenarios of the origin of thought styles. Thus ‘enriched’, the ideas from Genesis and Development of Scientific Fact would have become completely relevant to the task of working out a theory of knowledge for National Socialism. In fact, however, Fleck’s book ‘offers a critique of science under National Socialism which goes beyond an evaluation by moral standards’ (Borck, 2004: 455). The positive reviews of the book from 1936 in German medical journals, inspired partially by Nazi and racist ideology, testify to the veracity of the hermeneutic observation that the temporal distance in the process of reception is sine qua non for a contextualization of the received work that would not distort the latter. (It is another question that Fleck’s work itself offered resistance to its original interpretative contextualization, which brought into play essential distortions of the conception of thought collectives.) The temporal distance between the book’s original publication and its reissuing (1979) helped one to place the received work in appropriate contexts.

Doubtless Fleck had no illusions that the initial reception of his work had put it into a wrong context. He recognized the political misinterpretation of his ideas as early as in his debate with Tadeusz Bilikiewicz. In this debate on science’s situatedness in cultural milieus and the concept of thought style, Fleck made use of the opportunity to respond indirectly to the positive reviews, which left the impression of a suspicious intimacy between Fleck’s anti-objectivist and anti-essentialist approach to scientific research, and the relativist denial of science’s culturally unconditioned character, as this denial was supported by those looking for a ‘transformation’ of the scientific worldview in line with Nazi ideology. (The denial of the linguistic unification of scientific knowledge as suggested by logical empiricists is shared by both approaches.) However, in making the case that the unavoidable stylization of scientific research is by no means a precondition for political ideologization of science, Fleck countered the positive reception of his ideas. The protection of science from any political distortion of the research process is a central motif in Fleck’s rejoinder to Bilikiewicz. The development of this motif provides the best way of undoing the ideological misinterpretation as brought into being by the dominant Zeitgeist.

In countering (and ridiculing) both types of ‘demagogical-mythical’ doctrines in the mid-1930s − the programs of ‘proletarian science’ as subjected to the goals of planned economics, and the ideas of scientific theories in which the ‘spirit of a race’ were embodied – Fleck argues that the dependence of scientific cognition on cultural-historical milieus is to be sought in the ongoing configuration of Gestaltsehen and the use of rhetorical figures in linguistic descriptions of phenomena (Fleck, 2011: 329–331). No doubt selective perception combined with symbolization and metaphorization of phenomena transmits cultural values and tendencies influencing the research work of the thought collectives. Once established within the scientific communities, however, the thought styles inform and entirely shape the research’s cognitive values and orientations, and the regimes of constituting facts and objects of inquiry within scientific practices. The whole process of research runs through (what Fleck calls) the ‘collective mood of cognition’ (kollektive Erkenntnisstimmung). Being implicated in practices that are in a complicated fashion entangled with this mood, a thought collective is critical towards accepting aims and values that are imposed externally, and are not inaugurated by a community’s own thought style. Thus, a thought style armors a scientific community with resources for resisting external ideological and political manipulations. The defense of the freedom to do research (or the defense of the traditional academic ethos within a non-traditional epistemological framework) was Fleck’s (only possible) response to the initial misinterpretation of his work.

Interestingly enough, Fleck’s ideas became (upon their rediscovery) highly instrumental in critical studies of the bio-political ideology (and policies) of the Nazi regime. Thus, for instance, by complementing Fleck’s concept of thought style with a concept of work style, Jean-Paul Gaudillière (2004) shows how the symbiosis of racial hygiene was brought together during this regime, thereby providing a discourse of justification for natalist and racial policies. Another example in this regard is Veronika Lipphardt’s (2005) Fleckian reconstruction of the roots of Nazi racial policies in the racial studies conducted during the era of the Weimar Republic. In general Fleck’s conception proves to be especially relevant to the studies of the changing styles of thought during the so-called ‘molecularization of the human body’, which took place in the first three decades of the 20th century. ⁵ Since this molecularization has been used for devising new eugenic policies in which an amalgam of politically and scientifically motivated thought styles has been brought into play, the case studies that make use of Fleck’s ideas demonstrate the critical relevance of his work. These studies adopt his concept of thought style in a peculiar way. They put emphasis upon the double status of thought styles that at once promoted and have been promoted by the molecularization of the human body. Because of the resilience of these styles, the transition from theoretical science to eugenic policies has been accomplished quite easily, especially in Nazi Germany. ⁶

Implied reader and implied author in the reception of Fleck’s work

Did Fleck integrate an ‘implicit reader’ into his work? In the process of reception each particular actual reader of Fleck’s work is entitled to ask what is the question (admittedly posed by the author’s presumed reader) to which this work is an answer. In asking why Fleck wrote his monograph and to whom he addressed this opus, Eva Hedfors (2006: 133) criticizes the reception of him as ‘ “fateless” in the sense that everything seems to depart from him’. She argues that the reception would have been different, had one succeeded in scrutinizing Fleck’s relation to his past and his contemporaries. Of course, engaging with such a task is for her not for the sake of portraying Fleck’s personality, but for unveiling the implicit reader he has presumed in his work. The reception ought to be normatively guided by the identification of these readers’ expectations. Had repeated reconstructions of the same historical cases and episodes Fleck dealt with shown that the author’s promise to provide his implicit reader with good empirical case studies supporting the author’s epistemological project had not been kept, then all subsequent positive reception of his work would have had to be regarded as corrupted. As a corollary to this claim, Fleck’s monograph has been ignored for several decades because the expectations of the real readers (as informed by the author’s presumed reader) during this time had not been lived up to. The silence of the esoteric circles of readers ‘could thus be viewed as an adequate reaction and their neglect legitimate’ (Hedfors, 2006: 158). On her account, an interpretative tradition has been formed upon the rediscovery of Fleck’s work whose exponents were not preoccupied with the correctness of Fleck’s studies in the history of bacteriology and immunology. Thus, this interpretative tradition ruled out the very requirements for correct reading imposed by the work’s implicit reader. Had one realized the trick of this interpretation at the very beginning of Fleck’s rediscovery – so Hedfors’ argument goes – the subsequent reception of his work would have followed another trajectory. She even goes on to allude to the possibility that the ‘suspicious research ethics’ of Fleck’s microbiological investigations might have been tacitly adopted by those who praise him as a key forerunner of science studies (Hedfors, 2007: 155).

Hedfors is by no means original in arguing that for several reasons and in many respects Fleck was a person out of touch with the avant-garde trends in the domains of his immunological and bacteriological research work. Freudenthal and Löwy had drawn attention to his precarious situation many years earlier. Now, the question to be asked is the following one: Should the flaws in Fleck’s scientific (in particular, experimental) research work as well as the deficiencies in his historiographical analyses affect the reception of his historical-epistemological work? Certainly yes, and these flaws and deficiencies are not to be ignored. Yet this assertion does not entail that they (or their ignorance) are responsible for fuelling distorted (in particular, one-sided) tendencies in the process of reception. As a rule, the intrinsic defects of the received work provoke two types of reaction. They either stimulate a scrupulous search for the historical roots of these defects whereby new historical events to be studied and new questions to be asked come to the fore, ⁷ or they bring into being forms of ‘productive misunderstanding’ that play in most cases a quite positive role for the received work’s creative reception. Moreover, these forms might lead to really innovative re-contextualizing interpretations. Following again Martina Schlünder’s line of reasoning, the flaws and inconsistencies in the received work are often said to stimulate the appropriation of new possibilities. A case in point is Fleck’s reception in relativist and constructivist programs in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Thus, for instance, Steven Shapin’s (1986) productive misunderstanding consists in the exaggeration of the constructivist dimension in Fleck’s idea for a comparative sociology of thought styles, whereas David Bloor (1986) goes further in that regard, holding that Fleck anticipated the symmetry principle of the strong program.

Hedfors’ criticisms of (the reception of) Fleck’s work suffer from a hermeneutic confusion between the evaluation of Fleck as a scientist and historian of science, on the one hand, and the evaluation of the reception of his epistemological project, on the other. This is why she incorrectly admits that the flaws in Fleck’s scientific and historiographical initiatives must not only have an impact on Fleck’s social epistemology, but they must (somehow) correlate with flaws of the recipient programs. It goes without saying that she does not offer arguments for this relationship. In rejecting the possibility of introducing a ‘normative codex’ for a genuine reception, I touch upon a further specification of the issue of the ‘implicit reader’. Gadamer succinctly observes that reconstructing ‘the question to which the text is presumed to be the answer itself takes place within a process of questioning through which we try to answer the question that the text asks us’ (1989: 367). Thus, reconstructing the question to which the emergence of an intellectual work is supposedly an answer merges with the recipient’s own questioning. The implicit reader who is appealed to as the author’s presumed reader in the process of reception is not to be identified as an implied source of normative requirements for posing correct questions in reading the text. The implicit reader is not located within the text’s or work’s structure. This reader is rather the bearer of the whole dialogical questioning in the effective history of the work’s reception.

This is why the implicit reader ought to be supplemented by the counterpart-figure of the ‘implicit/implied author’ in the hermeneutic theory of reception. The author who can be a dialogical partner of the implied reader was introduced as a concept in literary criticism with the intent to do justice to the work’s creator – without succumbing to biographism and psychologism – in a time when the New Criticism paradigm tumbled into crisis. In this paradigm, the context – in which the authorial voice is to be heard – must be ignored, and the literary work of art be interpreted as a self-contained whole. The concept of implied author allows the critic to take into account the author’s role without making use of the real author’s profile as an explanatory factor (Kindt & Muller, 2006: 10). The implied author – especially in most recent versions of this concept – is somehow integrated in the meaning of the literary work. However, this very integration follows scenarios that oppose the doctrine of hermeneutic intentionalism as it was discussed earlier. The work’s meaning is not embodied in the author’s intention. Yet this meaning depends on a hidden structure of normative instructions for making choices in reading the work. Being identified with the implied author, this structure is linked to the real author’s worldview, but by no means coincides with it. The implied author always differs from the real one. Thus considered, the implied author acquires the status of a placeholder for a theory of interpretative reception.

It is not my aim to enter here into this complex and highly ramified problematic. My discussion is confined to the following short remark. Interestingly enough, the concept of implied reader was introduced by Wayne Booth with a normative-ethical intent: since literary works are to be read as ethically normative worlds, the rhetorical communication and transmission of values and norms is to be attributed to a ‘morally ideal narrator’. Roughly, the latter directs the choices of options in interpreting various facets of the work’s meaning. The implied author as differing from the real author is entitled to communicate the ideal narrator’s ethos by means of pertinent rhetorical devices. This normative-ethical aspect of the concept has remained preserved in its subsequent carrier in literary theory, although the recipients of Booth’s ideas have tended to regard the implied author as endowed with multiple personalities, and capable of suggesting dialogically a multitude of ethical strategies in interpreting the work. Putting emphasis on the ethical aspect is quite appropriate when one applies the concept of implied reader to the study of the effective-historical reception of Fleck’s work.

Fleck’s implied author is most palpable – even sketchily depicted – in his ultimate paper (Fleck, 1986: 153–160). Imbued with visionary power, the paper is devoted, as it were, to the non-existent contexts that the reception of his work ought to wait for. First among them is the political context when science will no longer be a ‘servant of politics and industry’, and will be able to cultivate a ‘critical resistance to all sorts of propaganda’. Next is the social-epistemological context when the epistemological naiveté of hypostatizing the individual knowing subject will be over. The context of historical edification will come into being when scientists become aware of science’s intrinsic historicity. Another specific context in which Fleck’s work is to be received refers to the reflexivity that will allow one to take into consideration the role of pre-theoretical ideas, images, and ‘ingenious intuitions’ in the constitution of scientific objects of inquiry. And finally, the meta-scientific context will arise when a dialogical convergence between science and humanities takes place. Fleck’s implied author is the ethos of his moral-political-epistemological position, which should be discovered by recipients reading his work in all of these as yet non-existing contexts.

Conclusion

Might the effective history of reception confirm or disconfirm the historical success of the received theoretical work? From the viewpoint of philosophical hermeneutics, there are two undisputed criteria for such a success. First, the work is successful if the basic case study designed to support the whole work might be continued in an innovative manner through the work’s re-contextualizing interpretation. In Fleck’s work, this is the case study of the discovery of the Wassermann reaction. A Fleckian continuation of Fleck’s reconstruction of the story of the Wassermann reaction would attest to the historiographical significance of the program supported by the original case study. Ilana Löwy (2004a) demonstrated cogently that the very continuation (in a Fleckian manner) of Fleck’s story of the discovery of the antibody test for syphilis provides an excellent example of a re-contextualizing interpretation that meets the aforementioned criterion. Fleck ends his story about the diagnostic specificity of this particular serological test with comments on events from the mid-1920s. On Löwy’s argument, the continuation of the story of how the scientific fact (presumably confirmed by the success of this test) that has been constituted is to be placed in the context of legal and administrative-regulative measures like the introduction of mass screening for syphilis via legislation. In the period of approximately fifteen years that followed the publication of Fleck’s book, these measures would play a leading role in recasting the fact of the specificity of the Wassermann reaction. The latter would become a medical technology regulated by the state and incorporated in legal dispositions. At stake in Löwy’s study is not the constitution (i.e. the genesis and development) of a scientific fact, but the transformation of a scientific fact into a legally and politically governed technology. The reconstruction in a Fleckian manner of the development of the regulatory devices (based more or less on the Wassermann reaction) testifies to the historical success of Fleck’s research work.

The second criterion for success of the received work concerns the macro-historical significance of the work’s effective history of reception. If the history of re-contextualizing interpretations succeeds in showing the role the work has played in a macro-historical constellation of theories, programs, approaches, ideas, etc., then the work is to be regarded as a contributing ingredient of an episteme. The studies of Fleck’s works devoted to comparative analysis with the works of Kuhn (Brorson & Andersen, 2001; Mößner, 2011), Foucault (Braunstein, 2009), Metzger (Löwy, 1988), Canguilhem (Löwy, 2004b; Sinding, 2004, 2009), Mannheim (Seidel, 2011), Husserl (Rheinberger, 2005, 2010b), and Michael Polanyi (Hagner, 2012) have unveiled not a shared paradigm but rather a macro-historical episteme. Despite their divergences, the works of these authors epitomize a ‘historical a priori’ on the level of problematizing the practical constitution of scientific objects. In particular, these authors put into question the classical modern interpretation of the epistemic relationship, and conceived this relationship ‘no longer as analytic and contemplative but rather as synthetic and constructive, accompanied by phenomena of emergence that would become characteristic of entire series of discoveries’ (Rheinberger, 2010a: 29).

Three decades ago Patrick Heelan launched the reception of Fleck’s work in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology. He praised this work for its historical priority in raising the claim that the stylized empirical procedures in scientific research become ‘readable technologies’ in the process of symbolization and textualization of scientific objects (Heelan, 1986: 302). ⁸ Reading Fleck’s work in this perspective requires demonstrating in the first place the limited validity of the work’s interpretations in terms of conventionalist epistemology and social constructivism. Fleck approaches some claims of the former by stating that the thought styles necessarily impose conventions (theoretical claims that are saved from empirical refutation) on cognition. Like conventionalists, Fleck argues that descriptions of the same phenomena constrained by different thought styles are not always incommensurable. More specifically, Fleck addresses translation-equivalent theoretical descriptions that are incompatible since no model of the one is a model of the other (see in this regard the nice analysis of Ben-Menahem, 2006: 9–12). Accordingly, there is room for choosing between alternative (but equivalently acceptable) theoretical means in conceptualizing the research’s procedural experience. ⁹ The conventionalist thesis of underdetermination plays a prominent role in Fleck’s comparative cognitive sociology. And like Poincaré’s followers, Fleck subscribes to the view that the choice between different (but equivalent with respect to the observable consequences) theoretical schematizations of an empirical domain is very often a matter of convenience (but not of arbitrariness). The whole experience of a thought collective decides ultimately which is the most convenient schematization. (To be sure, however, in this formulation the term ‘experience’ is much broader than the same term as it is used in conventionalist epistemology.) Furthermore, in his criticism of logical empiricism Fleck makes use of conventionalist arguments against drawing a sharp demarcation between theoretical and empirical ingredients of scientific experience. Nonetheless, Heelan argues convincingly that Fleck cannot be regarded as a conventionalist. He stresses, in particular, that that consensual character of scientific inquiry is constrained not only by theoretical conventions but also by factors that are not reachable by logical-epistemological analysis. Yet the most important difference concerns the alternative approaches to truth. Fleck denies categorically any attempt at creating (even in the formal disciplines) truth by fiat.

No doubt, inasmuch as Fleck’s social epistemology and comparative cognitive sociology treat scientific facts as invented rather than discovered, they are to be characterized as constructivist initiatives. Fleck advocates a kind of non-relativist social constructivism informed by his views about the trans-subjective nature of science. True, he strongly opposes the doctrine that nature has joints, and that, accordingly, the task of scientific theories consists in providing correct accounts of pre-existing natural kinds. He is the author who for the first time foregrounds the instrumental, cognitive-intervening, performative, and material dimensions in the making of scientific facts and artifacts, thereby anticipating several developments in STS and cultural studies of science. Yet social constructivism is only a means towards and not the goal of Fleck’s work. He clearly follows the line of reasoning that all theoretical and empirical procedures and practices of construction take place always already in an interpretative medium. This is why they function as readable technologies. The enactment of the constructive procedures is a meaningful event since all elements and agents (or ‘actants’ in Latour’s sense) that get involved in these procedures are always already situated in a meaning-constituting interpretation. Because of the priority of the constitution of meaning (in particular, a meaningful domain of inquiry) over social construction of facts, it is much more germane to read Fleck’s work in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology than in those of constructivist sociology.

Annemarie Mol writes that, if ‘practices are foregrounded there is no longer a single passive object in the middle, waiting to be seen from the point of view of seemingly endless series of perspective’ (2002: 5). With Fleck one is to extend this view: there is only a difference between active and passive constitution of objects within configured interpretative practices. However, this is not a final conclusion, but rather a starting-point for a further re-contextualization of Fleck’s work.