Thought style and thought collective are two well-known concepts from Ludwik Fleck’s theory of science, which he originally formulated in Polish and German. This paper contends that these two concepts cannot be fully understood without a third—Stimmung/nastrój, which is one of the musical metaphors that play an important role in Fleck’s thinking. Because it is most often translated into English as “mood”, Fleck’s musical metaphors are mostly lost in translation, appearing as mere rhetoric. Only if and when we understand Stimmung/nastrój (...) in the musical meaning of attunement, we can fully understand thought collectives, for which Stimmung/nastrój is sine qua non, and thought style, which appears if and when a collective turns out to be an enduring and not a momentary one. (shrink)

This article takes issue with Kuhn’s description of the ‘Aristotle experience,’ an event that took place in 1947 and that he retrospectively characterized as a revelation that instantly delivered to him the key concepts of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). We trace a certain transformation of this narrative over time: whereas it commenced from a description of his impression of disparity between the textbook image of science and the study of historical sources, Kuhn started to characterize it as a (...) revelation after learning of the English translation of Fleck’s 1935 Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. This book anticipates many central Kuhnian claims. Kuhn read it as early as 1949, but never fully acknowledged it as a source of inspiration. We discuss four hypotheses concerning the possible influence of Fleck’s theory on Kuhn’s in light of the available evidence. We conclude that the degree of similarity between them is too great to be coincidental. (shrink)

This paper is a polemic with Wojciech Sady’s forgoing paper. The main objection to his new approach to demarcation problem is that this approach does not accomplish the criterion formulated in it . Sady accuses medical ethics of not being scientific but forgets that he does it from the philosophical point of view. The only reasonable way to solve the demarcation problem is to define its practical aim — what do we need it for? One of such possible aims is (...) to automate the process of distribution of scientific grants. Key words KNOWLEDGE, SCIENCE, CRITERION. (shrink)

The author analyses conceptual metaphors characteristic of one of the literary theories, the theory of intertextuality, employing the methods of cognitive linguistics, i.e. the cognitive theory of metaphor. He claims that the tools of this conception enable one to describe the idea of paradigm-change; in this context author considers the role of metaphor in science. By interpreting synonyms as different realizations of various Idealized Cognitive Models, he shows that the change of metaphors employed in talking about ‘what happens between texts’ (...) leads to evolutionary change from ‘influentology’ to ‘intertextuality’, a transformation closely related to the change of the subject of history of literature. The change of metaphors transforms the focus of literary theory ; its focus moves from the author to the reader, and from the act of creation to the act of reception. Within this perspective writing is no longer a creatio ex nihilo but an innovative re-creation of ‘what has already been read’. This change enables one to capture some paradoxical inversions, like the one which demonstrates how a subsequent texts influence texts prior to them. (shrink)