Styles of Scientific Thinking & Doing. A Genealogy of Scientific Reason

Abstract

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.