Ludwig Fleck on Stigler's Law of Eponymy

Things are not named after the person who discovers them, such as Halley's comet, which people knew about way before Halley. Stigler's Law says that.

Stigler credits sociologist Robert K. Merton with discovery of his law, btw. And Merton was a predecessor of Kuhn, who was inspired by Fleck.

Fleck was a bit ahead of his time (1930's). He was talking about Stigler's Law of Eponymy before it was even named (1980).

Fleck, in his book Genesis, has an idea that scientific facts are not eternal. Instead, they are alive. They are born, and live and die, and they originate from and co-evolve with the collective noosphere of humanity. He does not use the term noosphere, but he does say this:

"It was the prevailing social attitude that created the more concentrated thought collective which through continuous cooperation and mutual interaction among the members, achieved the collective experience and the perfection of the [Wasserman Reaction discovery] in communal anonymity." 

("Communal Anonymity!") 

"Many workers carried out these experiments almost simultaneously, but the actual authorship is due to the collective, the practice of cooperation and teamwork." (p78)
The first experiments by Wasserman are irreproducible. 

"But all really valuable experiments are like this -- "uncertain, incomplete, and unique." (p85) 

"And when experiments become certain, precise, and reproducible at any time, they no longer are necessary for research purposes proper, but function only for demonstration and ad hoc determinations." 

"If a research experiment were well defined, it would be altogether unnecessary to perform it." (p86)

***

Fleck understood that Scientists are a collective entity, where individuals do not functionally exist. Authorship is an illusion (hence my reference to the paradoxical Stigler's Law).

And Fleck understood that although Science is made of rock-solid theories based on empirical evidence, it is the vague, the ambiguous and the strange that guide Science in new directions, so that it can co-evolve with our own ability to use it.

Image source: link

Notes:
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

Post Script:
A real-fake book about eponymy written by an author with no name FTW!
Network Address, 2013
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-real-fake-book-about-eponymy-written.html