Thought collectives and notebooks

Wow, there’s some good insight in the writings this week. Well, there probably always is, and I just miss it. Anyway. . .

On page 112-113 Latour talks about Fleck and Wasserman, and within that marked off reading I found something I though was very interesting. He quotes Fleck stating, ‘Truth is not ‘relative’ and certainly not ‘subjective’ in the popular sense of the word. It is always, or almost always, completely determined within a thought style. One can never say that the same thought is true for A and false for B. If A and B belong to the same thought collective, the thought will either be true or false for both. But if they belong to different thought collectives, it will just not be the same thought’ (113-14). What this quote did was bring me back to our discussion of Crowley, and the fact that were such different readings of her work. There is a difference in our “thought collectives” and this is why we read it differently. No form of logic, reason, or affective rhetoric can change these different readings, because our thoughts on the matter are from different collectives. What I would like to know, is if this is a real reason for different readings of different situations, is how or if “thought collectives” can be combined, changed, or whatever. Is a thought collective the same as a “social” group, (I know bad word), or is a thought collective a part of a larger collective. It’s an interesting concept, and one I wouldn’t mind exploring more thoroughly.

My second thought is about the notebooks Latour suggests that be used when examining the social. He states, “By contrast, it seems too often that sociologist of the social are simply trying to ‘fix a world on paper’ as if this activity was never in risk of failing” (127). However, further on he talks about getting back to basics, and maintaining four different notebooks during research. I have no doubt that everything is data, and by keeping track of everything one would accumulate good sources. But his notebook idea is very complex, and the only seemingly basic component is the fact he’s using paper instead of bites.

Did anybody else think the notebooks were a bit much?