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The epidemiologist [[Ludwik Fleck]] (1896-1961) made one of the first attempts to apply the concept of communities as epistemic agents specifically to the process of scientific change. In ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' (1935)[[CiteRef::Fleck (1979)]], he argued that cognition was necessarily a collective social activity, since it depends on prior knowledge obtained from other people. New ideas arise within collective epistemic agents which he called ''thought collectives''; groups of people who participate in the mutual exchange of ideas. As an emergent consequence of mutual understandings and misunderstandings within such a group, a particular ''thought style'' arises, which determines how individual members of the thought collective think and perceive within the relevant domain. Scientific facts are socially constructed by thought collectives interacting with the world through observation and experiment, and can be revised or abandoned based on these interactions.[[CiteRef::Fleck (1979)]][[CiteRef:: Sady (2016)]]
[[Karl Popper]] (1902-1994)[[CiteRef::Popper (1963)]][[CiteRef::Popper (1972)]] advocated a falsificationist view of theory assessment. For Popper, members of a scientific community attempt to demonstrate the inadequacies of one another's theories by finding observational shortcomings or conceptual inadequacies. This is, necessarily, a community activity in which the community acts as an epistemic agent either accepting or rejecting a theory based on the outcome of such attempts. The outcome is that only the most empirically adequate and conceptually sound theories survive such community scrutiny. This is a kind of evolutionary epistemology.[[CiteRef::Longino (2016a)]]
The role of social communities as epistemic agents was also stressed by [[Thomas Kuhn]] (1922-1996) in his ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions''.[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962)]] Kuhn believed that the work of a scientific community was united by adherence to a ''paradigm'' of shared beliefs, practices, and exemplars. The ''paradigm'' guided puzzle solving research to explain more phenomena in its terms. Anomalies were phenomena that resisted explanation in terms of the theories, methods, and epistemic values that constituted the paradigm. Persistent anomalies could sometimes lead to a scientific revolution, in which the paradigm was displaced by a rival framework.
