LA CONSTRUCCIóN SOCIAL DE LOS INDIVIDUOS

ludwik fleck, the polish philosopher and scientist that influenced so much thomas kuhn？ conception with his notions of "thought style" and " thought collective ", states in his main work, the genesis and the development of a scientific fact, the position that thinking is centrally a product of a collective mind. we will present in this article his epistemological conceptions, and his vital circumstance, as an introduction to the notion of collective mind. later on, the existence of a collective mind is objected -assuming it is unnecessary to fleck？s purposes-; we propose that only the individuals possess the epistemic structures characteristic of the thought styles -the so call "mind"- and therefore, that they are the only ones that uses them to build new knowledge -to "think"-, in the interior of different thought collectives, and in interaction with their members. these individuals, in spite of their adscription to those communities, are, for this very same reason, unique.