Scientific Fact
...onalities than differences between the way that the two great thinkers approach the history of science. Analyzing their differences may give us a richer understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge. Kuhn’s central thesis in Scientific Revolutions is that science is developed not in a linear fashion that will inevitably lead us to find absolute truths about the world around us. Rather paradigms that consolidate various phenonmena at a given time make scientific development appear linear. But when these working paradigms fail to explain phenomena (phenomena which are discovered because of the specialization that the paradigm itself facilitates), then progress haults; crisis ensues, and through the process of debate and persuasion various theories (and adherents to those theories) compete to replace the old paradigm, in a process that Kuhn coined a “scientific revolution.” Obviously, Kuhn’s adherents to a working paradigm can be likened to Fleck’s thought collective. Both systems refer to a scientific community working under the same set of assumptions (which to the world at large are presented as truths), trying to discover facts. Fleck is primarily interested in the motivation of those groups, which is usually determined by sociological pressures. Kuhn is primarily interested in the intrinsic nature of the groups. Where their interests interesect, the differences are significant. Fleck argues that the Wasserman Reactions, a process for singling out syphilis was eventually discovered not because syphilis was the most deadly disease, but because the cosmological associations that syphilis drew made syphilology an attractive field. On the other hand, Kuhn argues that the impetus for scientific development is based not so much on presures of the world outside the scientific community, so much as the pressures within a scientific community. Likening normal science (science that’s done under a working paradigm, rather than during crisis) to a puzzle, and scientists to problem solvers, Kuhn argues that scientists only aproach those puzzles for which the working paradigm provides a solution: “It is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting... On the contrary, the really pressing problems, e.g., a cure for cancer or the design of lasting peace, are often not puzzles at all.”2 (36) Fleck would probably argue that scientists did find syphilis“instrinsically interesting,” and that is why they pursued singling it out. Indeed, in the development of syphilis, Fleck points out that there were two contrasting views as to the nature of syphilis: “an ethical-mystical” concept and “an empirical-therapeutic” concept; and that these concepts “became amalgamated.”2(5) How could this amalgamation be reconciled with the Kuhn’s theory of paradigms? Ultimately it cannot because while it seems that they, Kuhn and Fleck, are referring to the same phenomenon, they really are not. The convergence of ideas which Fleck describes refers to how the society at large came to view syphilis. While the scientists who pursued syphilology may have viewed syphilis in a similar w...