Abstract

LORENZANO, César. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF INDIVIDUALS. discus.filos [online]. 2008, vol.9, n.12, pp.75-96. ISSN 0124-6127.

Ludwik Fleck, the Polish philosopher and scientist that influenced so much Thomas Kuhn’ conception with his notions of "thought style" and " thought collective ", states in his main work, The genesis and the development of a scientific fact, the position that thinking is centrally a product of a collective mind. We will present in this article his epistemological conceptions, and his vital circumstance, as an introduction to the notion of collective mind. Later on, the existence of a collective mind is objected -assuming it is unnecessary to Fleck’s purposes-; we propose that only the individuals possess the epistemic structures characteristic of the thought styles -the so call "mind"- and therefore, that they are the only ones that uses them to build new knowledge -to "think"-, in the interior of different thought collectives, and in interaction with their members. These individuals, in spite of their adscription to those communities, are, for this very same reason, unique.

Keywords : Fleck; Kuhn; thought style; thought collective; individuals.

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