The Banana Peel Project

So, what is a thought style or mode of thought? According to Ludwik Fleck, it can only be understood in relation to the broader concept of a “thought collective.”

If we define “thought collective” as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special “carrier” for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style.

So, what exactly is a thought collective? What are its boundaries, its rules, its material form?

Fleck’s thought collectives appear anywhere there is a community of individuals who share a thought style. Thought styles, in turn, are shaped and in some sense embodied by infrastructures that determine how concepts migrate from individual to individual. Infrastructures can be simple communication protocols such as language or social conventions, but they can also be material. Scientific journals, information technology networks, educational institutions, and even books can shape the development and diffusion of new concepts. Science, Fleck’s object, makes this particularly obvious.

All of this means that no idea, fact, concept, or thought can exist in an individual alone. Knowledge can only be understood by placing it within the context of the collective, or community, as a whole.

Communication never occurs without a transformation, and indeed always involves a stylized remodeling, which intracollectively achieves corroboration and which intercollectively yields fundamental alteration.