Thought Styles In Text and Discourse

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1960s, linguistics turned away from traditional issues in linguistic research and focused on cognitive aspects. This so called cognitive turn in language analysis opened up new research perspectives. It pointed to the relevance of language as a medium of thought, and thus to the dialectical correspondence between language and thought. This new approach to linguistic analysis let the researchers rediscover the forgotten writings of the Polish physician and natural scientist Ludwik Fleck. The monograph he published in 1935 as well as his epistemological works on the sociology of knowledge based on some important findings in the field of bacteriology and serology failed to gain any recognition for decades. It was not until 30 years later that Thomas S. Kuhn referred to Fleck in the preface to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – a fact that gave impetus to the renewed studies of Fleck’s work.