A technology for the production of consensus. Methods exist as sources of confidence in objects of knowledge or study (see OBJECT). They claim predictable outcomes as well as the logical correspondence between these outcomes and the practices that produced them. This sociological aspect of method was suggested in the 1930s by the Polish-Jewish physician and microbiologist Ludwick Fleck, who wrote about “communities of thought” woven through consensual engagement in observational practices. While method in some cases seeks a prevailing objectivity, Fleck’s community of thought articulated an understanding of method that left room for the acceptance of provisional truths. In this way, methods can be understood to have legacies: they are transmitted, abandoned, and sometimes revived. One especially famous and highly narcissistic method, however, waged a prominent and influential crusade against doubt, and did so by positing an epistemology ostensibly indifferent to all historical, pragmatic, and/or communal foundations for truth (and access to it). Descartes’s method (i.e., The Method), in its radical disavowal of tradition and emphasis on the solitary, internal quest for access to the absolute, yielded a version of modernity founded on reason as a model for human progress. The Cartesian method of systematization eventually infiltrated humanistic modes of thought. Thus methodologies, often explained in introductions to written texts, purport to ensure access to knowledge on the basis of their freedom from bias or inconsistency (see METHODOLOGY). Whatever the status of truth as a methodological target, each method represents a disciplinary tool. Like the letter-size format, which fits any individual’s sheet of paper into any other’s binder, a method implies transferability and facilitates sharing. However, the application of a standard American three-hole punch to an A4 document produces notable disconformities.