Abstract

This article traces some of the transformation that the fields of folk psychology and anthropology underwent in the late nineteenth century. Ludwik Fleck, in developing his sociology of knowledge, drew on both of these fields; a legacy that makes it possible to conceive of his epistemology as a theory of communication. Fleck, in grounding his understanding of the relationship between sociality and communication on insights from these two disciplines, proposed the morphological concept of an organic formation of all scientific knowledge. Naturalising knowledge production in this manner, Fleck postulated a program of deciphering, reading, and translation that would relate all forms of knowledge back to the rules and conditions of its making. In this morphological conception of the processes of knowledge production, Fleck’s sociology bears significant similarities with the description of social institutions by French sociologists Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim, who also drew on insights from late-nineteenth-century folk psychology and anthropology.