Thought Collective

A thought collective, a term originated in German as "Denkkollektiv" by the Polish and Israeli physician Ludwik Fleck, is a community of researchers (Community Of Practice) who interact collectively towards the production or elaboration of knowledge using a shared framework of cultural customs and knowledge acquisition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_collective

Fleck identified the scientific production of knowledge as primarily (?) a social process that hinges upon prior discoveries and practices in a way that constrains and preconditions new ideas and concepts. He termed this shared collection of preexisting knowledge a "Denkstil" or thought style and formulated a comparative epistemology of science using these two ideas. (see Sociology of Philosophies)

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

He elaborated this idea with a series of examples in the 1935 essay Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache, together with a book of the same name, however, his ideas went largely unnoticed until Thomas Kuhn's rediscovery of them in the 1960s

Fleck likens the statement that a scientific fact has been ascertained, to a statement of the type "'someone recognizes something,'" a statement which is meaningless without further context.

Fleck's goal for this discussion was to situate the discovery of new scientific facts, a form of epistemological cognition, within the greater environment of knowledge that encompasses them. He promotes with the idea of the "Denkkollektiv" the tenet that any discovery is an interaction between at least three things, namely the discovered phenomenon, the discoverer, and the existing pool of knowledge from which they draw.

researchers produce common concepts and practices that they use to discuss and debate one another's ideas and discoveries. These common concepts and practices both provide a shared language of science within which they can communicate, and consequently limit the possibilities of thought that the researchers can have. (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

Within this conception of the production of scientific knowledge, the ideas, concepts, and theories of these researchers are permanently conditioned by their present "thought style" and cannot be considered independently of them. (GroupThink)

he maintained that the individual's only contribution to the production of new knowledge is the determination of results that follow from established conceptual preconditions.

Just as a soccer player makes little progress in a game without their interactions among a cooperating team, an individual researcher is lost without the thought collective that shapes their approach to scientific practice. Extending this analogy, ideas and concepts exchange between individuals in the thought collective like passes in a soccer match, each time gaining new directions and a change in momentum.

This reminds of the weaknesses of Sociology of Philosophies, a focus on the structure/process/culture of science, while completely ignoring the content and accuracy of the thoughts being created/tested.