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Hans-Jörg Rheinberger constructed his historical epistemology of epistemic things by analyzing experimental practices in molecular biology during the 1970s and 80s. With genetic sequencing and multi-omics approaches, data has become a new resource in the life sciences, questioning the applicability of his concept of experimental system. By historicizing Rheinberger's epistemology, the paper focuses on its relatedness to Ludwik Fleck's notion of an aviso of resistance and points to a gradual shift in Rheinberger's emphasis, moving from an initial focus on writing and its differentiality to work on materials, preparations, and representations. By anchoring visualization in these material practices, Rheinberger also sheds new light on the changing conditions of experimentation in the life sciences due to big data, where visualization emphasizes patterns and correlations rather than substrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the ways in which beliefs about cervical cancer became contested within the medical profession in New Zealand from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Medical dissenters who contested orthodox beliefs about cervical cancer during this period challenged the medical profession in a number of ways. In particular, professional unity and authority were called into question and threatened to turn professional uncertainties into public anxieties. Professional strategies were employed to cope with knowledge claims that threatened existing medical beliefs. The work of Ludwik Fleck forms the basis of a discussion of the ways in which medical knowledge is located and negotiated within a social context. This case study shows that closure of disputes over knowledge claims about cervical cancer occurred largely as a result of an inquiry into medical practice presided over by the laity and through an appeal to the moral as well as the scientific-technical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the career of the concept scientific community through three discernible stages. The formative stages is presented by Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. It was learned that one of the early expositions of the theme that scientific knowledge is socially conditioned, Fleck's work revolves around the correlative concepts of thought collective and thought style. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was discussed. Stage three in the career of the concept scientific community is marked by criticism and the development of alternative models. During the 1960s and 70s, the view prevailed among metascientists that scientific knowledge is produced by communities of specialists. In the works of leading contemporary philosophers of science, as in many historical studies, the existence of scientific communities was assumed without question or argument. Kuhn's paper represents a watershed in the histories of both the concept itself and the entire discipline of sociology of science. Social integration in science was considered a result of a consensus about strategic norms or standards. Findings on the examination of the concept scientific community through the related works of Kuhn and Fleck, the Polish scientist and scientist knowledge, was presented.

Media history offers an essential but easily overlooked set of tools for understanding scientific facts as historical processes. This essay argues that the "when" of the specific media through which scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, and taken up as authoritative has played a central part in the "how," "what," and "why" of scientific fact‐making as well as our iterative attempts to historicize science, medicine, and technology. Attending explicitly to how new (and old) media engage in the production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge can further help the historian understand dilations and contractions in the threshold of participation in scientific fact‐making itself. Manuscripts, printing presses, cheap newsprint, and open‐source digital publications open up and shut down possibilities of who gets to learn about science as news, who gets to act as a nodal point in the circulation of scientific knowledge, and who is able to make and share an observation about the natural world in the first place. Centering the media of scientific knowledge‐in‐the‐making offers a means of relating the history of science to the broader history of knowledge not in terms of absolute difference but in terms of the specificity of mediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

. The aim of the article is to assess the usefulness of Ludwik Fleck's theory of thought-styles for the history of ophthalmology. On the basis of Fleck's ideas, the authors attempt to analyse the development of concepts of vision. They enumerate three styles in the history of ophthalmology: humoral, iatromechanical and micro-tissue. In conclusion, they state that the history of evolution of the concept of vision should be considered not only from the perspective of achievements of individual scientists but also with the addition of the social 'mood' that prevailed in a given historical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]