Paper short abstract:

This paper brings a concept of the relationship between thought and truth developed in the study of religion into conversation with the question of the relationship between thought and truth developed by Ludwik Fleck.

Paper long abstract:

This paper compares the relationship between thought and truth in two thinkers who occupy related “founding” positions in religious studies and science studies: Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1934). Following criticisms of truth claims in religious studies made by Nancy Levene (2017), it argues that there is a distinction missing from both thinkers’ work: both articulate concepts of mind and world, but neither author develops the third position of mind and world’s mutual supportive relation. This prevents both authors from articulating an interpretive position that is adequately responsible for that position’s claims. This paper shows how reflection on the relationship between thought and truth developed within religious studies—a field shaped by its navigation of speculative claims—can empower the science studies, which also discusses speculative claims but which has developed a younger discourse about speculation in thought.

The first section compares Durkheim and Fleck’s thought, which draws the fundamental problems at stake in each field into conversation. Fleck cited Durkheim; this section further expands their conversation. The second develops a supplemented version of their theories. The third demonstrates this analysis in a case study drawn from the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, when ecologists debated the relationship between ethics and truth in the nascent field of systems ecology in the 1970s. This paper shows how a conversation between reflection about the nature of “knowledge” in STS and religious studies might empower both fields when we ask our fundamental questions.