Abstract

Hayden White's tropes of the imagination purport to give the historian the vantage point from which the historical object can be stabilized and eventually understood. Ludwik Fleck, a scientist, found that all scientific, all creative thinking is a highly figurative procedure, a complex weaving together of a conversation of voices from past traditions, historical and mythical, as well as voices from the present. The fixed or the real or the unrelevatized can always be shown to be a construction, if one moves to another vantage point. Some of the best scientific thinking, such as Einstein's and Heisenberg's, has been done by those who dispensed with the necessity of a fixed epistemological vantage point. White's discourse analysis cannot claim to be a fixed point from which the other texts are formalized