  Cognition is a collective activity. It is confusing just to say that an individual X got to know a phenomenon P: one should say that “X got to know P in the thought style S from the epoch E” (1936, V)—yet the thought style S from the epoch E is a product of a certain thought collective to which X belongs. What to a stubborn metaphysician appears as necessary forms of thinking results from the social nature of cognition: