Scholarship as Bricolage: ‘Hybrid Works’ and Styles of Reasoning in the Enlightenment-Era Humanities

In this paper I propose a solution to the crucial issue of the number of styles of reasoning. Ever since, in the 1980s, Ian Hacking outlined what he later called the ‘project of styles of scientific reasoning’, for short the ‘styles project’, he has never provided criteria for individuating styles of reasoning. Whether or not certain ways of thinking can be counted as styles of reasoning in the sense of Hacking is a question that has remained unanswered, despite its apparent relevance to various other controversial issues related to the styles project. I shall frame the issue within a view of categorization which begins with the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and culminates with the so-called theory of prototypes in psychological research. My conclusion will be that there is no clear boundary to the category of styles of reasoning and that degrees of category membership for a given way of thinking are determined by its degree of similarity to prototypes such as the statistical style of reasoning.

In this chapter I shall present two different notions of the concept of ‘ways of thinking’ named ‘style of reasoning’ and ‘epistemic virtue’, which have been proposed, respectively, by Ian Hacking and by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston. To explain how the former characterizes the notion of style of reasoning, I shall reread his book The Emergence of Probability in terms of the notion of ‘statistical style of reasoning’ and Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump in terms of the notion of ‘laboratory style of reasoning’. My analysis will show that many points of Hacking’s styles project need to be developed in order to make his suggestions into a full-fledged theory. A salient point of my analysis will be that Hacking’s is another of the projects of historical epistemology that historicize Kant. I shall also show that there are substantial convergences between the styles project and Daston and Galison’s study on objectivity. Finally, following Williams’s account of truth and truthfulness, I shall argue that styles of reasoning are ways of telling the truth and ways of looking at the world.KeywordsStyles of reasoningHistorical epistemologyStatistical style of reasoningLaboratory style of reasoningEpistemic virtuesIan HackingLorraine DastonPeter GalisonTruthfulnessBernard Williams

Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this article analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz podpol'ya (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man's argument may, as this article shows, be analyzed using logical truth tables to demonstrate that, however thorough the underground man's argument may appear, it does not consider the counterexample of selfless altruism. This omission prepares the way for the underground man's rejection of Liza at the climax of the second part of the novel. Sōseki's novel, too, contains a confession, namely Sensei's testament, in which Sensei relates how he arrived at his belief that humanity is fundamentally selfish. Sensei's style of reasoning is primarily inductive, in contrast with that of other characters in Sōseki's novel, and the present article argues that Sensei's style of reasoning is a primary cause of his suicide. In each novel, then, there is a sustained consideration of how and to what extent a style of reasoning is bound up with a character's fate.

This article departs from Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘styles of reasoning’ to argue that open architecture is not necessarily an ontological, but rather a methodological category, and that in order to understand open architecture we require an appropriate style of architectural reasoning. Stanford Anderson’s approach to Imre Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes in architecture is used to develop the idea that a precise style of reasoning forms an explicit understanding of architectural openness, and is elaborated further using Michael Hays’s notion of critical architecture as an alternative approach to open architecture, which is free from any predetermined logic. The article concludes with an attempt to identify similarities between the work of Anderson and Hays as a basis for an open style of architectural reasoning.

In this chapter, Styles of scientific thinking & doing. A genealogy of scientific reason, I work on the “style of scientific reasoning”, later called “style of scientific thinking & doing”. I deal with this node in the first place because I visualize it as basal, both because it is a condition of possibility for the emergence of objects and concepts that appear in other nodes, and because one way or another all the others are related to it. At the beginning of the chapter I deal with the antecedents, differences and convergences that Ian Hacking’s notion of style of scientific reasoning has with meta-concepts proposed by other philosophers and historians of science. I show how already in 1979, in an article where Hacking offers his interpretation of Michel Foucault’s thinking, he discusses some of what will later be characteristic of his own notion of style. I deal in particular with the notion of style of scientific thinking of Alistair Crombie, which Hacking considers an immediate antecedent of his notion of style of scientific reasoning. I continue by going deeper into the notion of style of scientific reasoning by means of an analysis of its particular features, as well as their relation to notions proposed by Foucault.

Styles of reasoning: A pluralist view

This article investigates the birth phase of a platform-ecosystem’s life cycle. Building on the case of a Near Field Communication platform-ecosystem, it explores how the development of architectural knowledge shapes the birth stage of the business ecosystem’s organizational form. The results of the case study provide evidence that the birth of a business ecosystem relies on a collaborative process of exploration made up with four sequences: ideation, test and experimentation, value expansion and reflective inquiry. This sequential process shapes the development of the various tangible and intangible assets encapsulated in the architectural knowledge that enables the definition of the business ecosystem’s organizational form.JEL Codes: M21, O32, O34

This paper explores the emergence of a new style of reasoning in early modern thought, that of reviewing, and how it changed the way of doing science and philosophy. It shows (1) how reviewing produced new objects of knowledge—that is, reviews in all their various formats; (2) how reviewing generated authorities and monopolies of knowledge, establishing new criteria for truth and falsehood, and affirming new trends and spheres of influences; (3) how reviewing created a new mode of intellectual work for scientists and philosophers, establishing articulated ways of sharing knowledge with an expectation of specific standards; (4) how reviewing as a form of testing knowledge and at the same time a way of making public the test follows the same pattern as the experimental style of reasoning, but while the latter was based on experimentation, the former used the dissemination of ideas as a warrant of their validity.

Due to technological convergence, complexes of interrelated industries are emerging. This paper presents a conceptual framework of the role different organizational forms and combinative capabilities play in the management of organizational knowledge integration in this context. The focus is on firms previously operating in one of the relatively stable constituting industries. We argue that a firm's organizational form has to be matched with appropriate combinative capabilities in order to integrate component knowledge into architectural knowledge that consequently serves as a platform for generating new product–market combinations. The framework is empirically illustrated using the example of two Dutch publishing firms moving into the multimedia complex, which is currently emerging around information and communication technologies. The empirical analysis shows that the framework offers strong potential for improving the understanding of the complex process of organizational knowledge integration, as the prerequisite for developing new business in an emerging industrial complex.

There is no more central issue to education than thinking and reasoning. Certainly, such an emphasis chimes with the rationalist and cognitive deep structure of the Western educational tradition. The contemporary tendency reinforced by cognitive science is to treat thinking ahistorically and aculturally as though physiology, brain structure and human evolution are all there is to say about thinking that is worthwhile or educationally significant. The movement of critical thinking also tends to treat thinking ahistorically, focusing on universal processes of logic and reasoning. Against this trend and against the scientific spirit of the age this paper presents a historical and philosophical picture of thinking. By contrast with dominant cognitive and logical models the paper emphasizes kinds of thinking and styles of reasoning. The paper grows out of interests primarily in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and in the extension and development of their work in Critical Theory and French poststructuralist philosophy. The paper draws directly on some of this work to argue for the recognition of different kinds of thinking, which are explored by reference to Heidegger, and also the significance of styles of reasoning, which are explored by reference to Wittgenstein and to Ian Hacking.

Статья посвящена взаимоотношениям архитектуры и со­циологии как сфер академического знания. Опираясь на на­укометрический анализ массивов публикаций, посвящённых этими двумя сферами друг другу, автор пытается выяснить, насколько данное пограничное поле развито на фоне дис­циплинарных «метрополий» и близких междисциплинарных областей, какими отраслями знания, помимо архитектуры и социологии, и какими по научной квалификации специали­стами оно возделывается. Показано, что архитектура и соци­ология испытывают стабильный взаимный интерес, формируя область социологии архитектуры как массива академических публикаций. По признаку количества публикуемых работ она менее развита, чем социология города или пространства, но вполне сравнима с социологией дизайна, градостроительства и урбанистики. Очерчены географические (города) и институ­циональные (вузы, НИИ) рамки концентрации и производства современного архитектурно-социологического знания, в том числе - основные его очаги. Сформированы ранжированные списки наиболее продуктивных и влиятельных российских «социологических архитекторов» и «архитектурных социо­логов». Выявлены основные формы социального взаимодей­ствия архитекторов с социологами - «альянсы», «тандемы» и «партнёрства». Затронут феномен «кентавров» - лиц, объединяющих в силу личностных особенностей, професси­ональной и академической биографии и опыта видение, по­нимание и знания и архитекторов, и социологов. Обозначены организационные структуры в истории отечественного знания и профессиональной архитектурной практики - фокусы ар­хитектурно-социологической междисциплинарности - как фактор формирования синтетических, пограничных компе­тенций. Сделан вывод о потенциале междисциплинарных объединений для дальнейшего развития социального знания в архитектуре.

The analytical notion of ‘scientific style of reasoning’, introduced by Ian Hacking in the middle of the 1980s, has become widespread in the literature of the history and philosophy of science. However, scholars have rarely made explicit the philosophical assumptions and the research objectives underlying the notion of style: what are its philosophical roots? How does the notion of style fit into the area of research of historical epistemology? What does a comparison between the Hacking’s project on styles of thinking and other similar projects suggest? My aim in this paper is to answer these questions. Hacking has denied that his project of styles of thinking falls into the field of historical epistemology. I shall challenge his remark by tracing out the connections of the notion of style with historical epistemology and, more in general, with a tradition of thought born in France in the beginning of twentieth-century.

This paper tries to motivate three desiderata for historical epistemologies: (a) that they should be reflective about the pedigree of their conceptual apparatus; (b) that they must face up to the potentially relativistic consequences of their historicism; and (c) that they must not forget the hard-won lessons of microhistory (i.e. historical events must be explained causally; historical events must not be artificially divided into internal/intellectual and external/social “factors” or “levels”; and constructed series of homogenous events must not be treated as quasi-organisms). Ian Hacking’s work on styles of reasoning and Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s investigation into epistemic virtues are used to identify the costs of neglecting these desiderata.

We argue that Ian Hacking’s work on experimentation and styles of reasoning offers valuable insights for the current debate on the nature of scientific understanding, which so far has largely been focused on the role of theories and explanations. Hacking’s suggestion that reasoning not only involves thinking but also doing helps to recognise the role of experimentation and manipulation in scientific understanding. We apply this idea by relating Hacking’s views on explanation and theorising to the contextual theory of scientific understanding developed by one of us (De Regt 2017). We then take a constructive approach by developing an account of pragmatic understanding that accommodates styles of reasoning and the centrality of manipulation and intervention in Hacking’s philosophy of science. Our overall aim in the paper is to bring the neglected role of experimentation in producing scientific understanding to the fore. We conclude by suggesting that scientific understanding involves both representing and intervening.

ABSTRACTThe question as to whether Ian Hacking’s project of scientific styles of thinking entails epistemic relativism has received considerable attention. However, scholars have never discussed it vis-à-vis Wittgenstein. This is unfortunate: not only is Wittgenstein the philosopher who, together with Foucault, has influenced Hacking the most, but he has also faced the same accusation of ‘relativism’. I shall explore the conceptual similarities and differences between Hacking’s notion of style of thinking and Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. It is a fact that whether or not the latter entails epistemic relativism is still a controversial question. From my comparative analysis, it will emerge that there are stronger reasons to conclude that Hacking’s notion of style leads to epistemic relativism than there are to reach the same conclusion in the case of Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. This point will be at odds with the anti-relativistic stance that Hacking has taken in his more recent writings.