The 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. (shrink)

In philosophy of science, the literature on abduction and the literature on styles of thinking have existed almost totally in parallel. Here, for the first time, we bring them together and explore their mutual relevance. What is the consequence of the existence of several styles of scientific thinking for abduction? Can abduction, as a general creative mode of inference, have distinct characteristic forms within each style? To investigate this, firstly, we present the concept of abduction; secondly we analyze what is (...) understood by styles of thinking; thirdly, we give some comments on abduction and styles of thinking by analyzing examples of scientific discovery or innovation within each style. We develop a case-based comparative investigation of creative aspects of abductive reasoning with examples drawn from different styles of scientific thinking and doing as understood by the Crombie/hacking tradition. We argue that abduction, as a general mode of reasoning, can have a variety of specific expressions enabled and constrained by the styles of scientific thinking. Finally, we draw some conclusions on the relationship between abduction and styles of thinking suggesting that scientific discovery is a dynamical goal-directed activity within the scientific community that benefits from distinct styles of thinking and doing research. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that a comprehensive account of the role of representations in science should reconsider some neglected theses of the classical philosophy of science proposed in the first decades of the 20th century. More precisely, it is argued that the accounts of Helmholtz and Hertz may be taken as prototypes of representational accounts in which structure preservation plays an essential role. Following Reichenbach, structure-preserving representations provide a useful device for formulating an up-to-date version of (...) a (relativized) Kantian a priori. An essential feature of modern scientific representations is their mathematical character. That is, representations can be conceived as (partially) structure-preserving maps or functions. This observation suggests an interesting but neglected perspective on the history and philosophy of this concept, namely, that structure-preserving representations are closely related to a priori elements of scientific knowledge. Reichenbach’s early theory of a relativized constitutive but non-apodictic a priori component of scientific knowledge provides a further elaboration of Kantian aspects of scientific representation. To cope with the dynamic aspects of the evolution of scientific knowledge, Cassirer proposed a re-interpretation of the concept of representation that conceived of a particular representation as only one phase in a continuous process determined by pragmatic considerations. Pragmatic aspects of representations are further elaborated in the classical account of C.I. Lewis and the more modern of Hasok Chang. (shrink)