Resumen

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.

Palabras clave : Fleck; Kuhn; thought style; thought collective; individuals.

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