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These forms were supposedly universal and unchanging. Fleck agrees with Kant that human knowledge is constructed from some internalized knowledge like Kant's forms, and that form is necessary for the construction of sensation into knowledge, but, disagrees that any form is universal. Fleck instead sees the formal knowledge that constructs reality — one's thought-style — as the product of historical circumstances. Fleck would assert that the way a medieval monk, for example, sees the world through wholly different means than a theoretical physicist might. Taking from Durkheim's thesis on the sociology of thought, this formal style of thinking is the product of institutions and communities (thought-collectives) that an individual is part of.
Jonathan Harwood notes that Fleck, however, working mostly isolated, was far more radical in his approach. While Durkheim and other early sociologists of knowledge (especially Lévy-Bruhl) restricted themselves to the "beliefs of traditional societies," Fleck criticized this and extended his investigation to the influence of a thought-collective on the cognitive processes of individuals in all circumstances, including in the generation of scientific knowledge.[[CiteRef::Ludwik Fleck and the sociology of knowledge]] In other words, Fleck extends the argument by asserting that any way by which members of a thought-collective see and think about the world is a sociological construction.[[CiteRef::Sady (2016)]] As such Fleck is the first sociologist and philosopher to investigate the construction of ''scientific'' knowledge.
|Major Contributions=== Fleck on Thought-Collectives and Incommensurability ==