“Pani z pieskiem” (“Lady with Pooch”)

Ludwik Fleck’s uses of images in his epistemological works

Abstract

Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961) was a bilingual academic conversant with the medical and philosophical vocabulary in both Polish and German. This paper pays tribute to Fleck’s academic bilingualism and focuses on his uses of images in the original versions of his epistemological works “Some Specific Features of the Medical Way of Thinking” (1927), “Crisis of Reality” (1929), “Scientific Observation and Perception in General” (1935) and “To Look, To See, To Know” (1947). Images are understood as actual artifacts as well as literary metaphors that structure Fleck’s thinking on epistemology. By examining Fleck’s rhetoric in the original Polish and German versions of these texts this paper unfolds the multifaceted meanings and connotations of the various image metaphors and illuminates the rhetoric impact of Gestalt psychology on Fleck’s ideas on cognition.