Matteo Vagelli

In this paper, I examine Ian Hacking’s theory of styles of scientific reasoning and its relationship to Michel Foucault’s archaeology of discourse. In his early writings on styles, Hacking draws on Foucault’s notion of “positivity,” which involves the introduction, by styles, of classes of propositions that are, as it were, “up for grabs as true-or-false.” However, beginning in the 2000s, Hacking replaces “positivity” with “truthfulness,” understood as “ways of telling the truth”—a concept he borrows from Bernard Williams. Hacking presents this shift as a recasting of the same thoughts using an alternate idiom, one intended to be more accessible to analytic philosophers. Contrary to Hacking’s own assessment, I argue that positivity and truthfulness are only apparently similar and that some of Hacking’s original intentions may risk being partially lost or overlooked in the transition from the former to the latter.

The term “historical epistemology” began circulating in the Anglosphere since the late1990s and early 2000s thanks to a relatively identifiable, albeit disparate, group of historians and philosophers of science with different backgrounds who appealed to this form of inquiry to describe their work. The fragmentation of contemporary forms of historical epistemology into a variety of distant topics and divergent approaches has generated some skepticism about the legitimacy of the method of historical epistemology vis-à-vis the history and philosophy of science and has led critics to emphasize the conceptual problems ostensibly undermining the entire enterprise. In this chapter, I show that there is a continuity between contemporary uses of the term ‘historical epistemology’ and the later phases of the Anglophone debate over the ‘marriage’ of history and philosophy of science. I also argue that the 1990s narrative about the ‘invention’ of historical epistemology by Anglophone philosophers and historians of science partially emerged due to insufficient consideration of other forms of historical epistemology.

styleThis concluding chapter explores the multifaceted role of the concept of “stylestyle” in historiography, particularly within the realms of the history and philosophy of science. It discusses how “style” serves as a flexible and powerful analytical tool, influencing various intellectual domains and ideological frameworks. Through a dual perspective—history and philosophy of science and history of philosophy of science—the text delves into the contributions of different intellectual strands, notably the Anglophone and French “styles” in the study of science. It further links the idea of “styles of philosophy” to the notion of “fields of interrogationfield of interrogation”, that is, to a distinctive way of or strategy for questioning knowledge and science. While arguing for a holistic understanding of historical epistemology, integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives and philosophical inquiries, the chapter emphasizes the philosophical inspiration and aim of this sort of inquiry.

In this chapter I argue that philosophy of science did not become suddenly historicized at the turn of the 1960s: rather, the “historical turn” involved a longer process which expanded in the following decades and, thanks to renewed interest at the beginning of the 1990s, gained further momentum in the early 2000s. This history testifies to the fact that philosophy still struggles to find a conceptual rationale for addressing the history of science. As SchickoreSchickore, Jutta has argued, the error condemning philosophy and history to perpetual incongruity is the “confrontation modelconfrontation model”, which conceives the two disciplines as separate, pre-given building blocks. The resulting imbalance—caused by an oscillation between a priori and a posteriori approaches, with the latter in turn divided among empirical-naturalized and hermeneuticist-historicist conceptions of the relation between history and philosophy of science—has impeded the emergence of a new, synthetic approach that fully integrates philosophical and historical perspectives. History and philosophy have never merged into a single discipline, like a chemical compound, but rather have remained separate operators united by a new, hyphened umbrella (history-and-philosophy of science) term, like a chemical mixture.

In this chapter, I examine Ian HackingHacking, Ian’s theory of stylesstyle of scientific reasoning and its implications for the merging of philosophical and historical perspectives on the study of science. Hacking’s styles project, initiated in 1982 and lasting over three decades, developed a concept of scientific styles intended to explain the historical and contextual aspects of scientific knowledge and practice, while also acknowledging its objective and progressive features. Special focus on Hacking’s conception of epistemological styles is warranted by both the influence of his theory on contemporary historical epistemologists and by the ways his theory draws simultaneously from Analytical and Continental conceptual frameworks. The chapter highlights the Foucauldian underpinnings of Hacking’s notion of styles of reasoning and demonstrates how Hacking also mobilized FoucaultFoucault, Michel to develop his views on language and probability. Clarifying the concept of styles of scientific reasoning will help elucidate some of the features of the historical shift that occurred between the “classical” phase of historical epistemology and the “contemporary” one.

In this chapter, I discuss how French historical epistemology—though constituting neither a philosophical tradition nor a proper philosophical school—produced a distinct “stylestyle” indebted to the philosophical and historiographic debates prevailing in France from the early twentieth century until at least the late 1960s. The most salient features of this style are typically considered as most distinctly and originally represented by the works of BachelardBachelard, Gaston and CanguilhemCanguilhem, Georges, and not infrequently also associated with the work of Michel FoucaultFoucault, Michel. To distinguish the specificity and development of multifarious methodology characterizing this stylestyle, I contrast it with an alternative, more empirical trend irrigating French discussions of the relationship between philosophy and history during the first decades of the twentieth century. This empirical approach mobilized the metaphor of the laboratorylaboratory (history of science as) in attempt to articulate how philosophers take up the history of science as a “mental microscope” in order to make philosophical generalizations. The “normative turn” instantiated by French historical epistemology, and by Bachelard and Canguilhem in particular, instead employed the metaphor of the tribunaltribunal (history of science as). Despite upholding an a posteriori approach, Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault offer a “critical” history of rationality opposed to both the ideal of a totalizing historytotal history and the ideal of objective, neutral observation of history. Analyzing this normative and “critical” stylistic approach offers us a better grasp on the specificity of the contributions of these thinkers—not only within the French context but also with respect to Anglophone debates.

This opening chapter presents the main thrust of the book, which delves into the intricate relationship between history and philosophy of science by focusing on the evolution of historical epistemology as a methodological approach to understanding scientific knowledge. It traces the trajectory of historical epistemology from its roots in a French philosophical context to its contemporary manifestations within Anglophone debates. By examining key figures such as Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault, and Hacking, the book elucidates the diverse methodologies and conceptual frameworks employed in historical epistemology. This chapter highlights tensions and contradictions within the field, particularly in reconciling historical contextualization with philosophical analysis. Through a comparative analysis of French and Anglophone approaches, the author explores the implications of presentismpresentism, anti-empiricism, and the notion of scientific stylesstyle in shaping our understanding of scientific knowledge. Ultimately, this introduction offers insights into the ongoing dialogue between history and philosophy of science, shedding light on the challenges and possibilities of integrating these disciplines.

In this chapter, I revisit CanguilhemCanguilhem, Georges’s interpretation of BachelardBachelard, Gaston’s “normative turn” in epistemology and his application of the principle of recurrence to medicine and the life sciences. This discussion will first highlight that, according to Canguilhem, the laboratorylaboratory (history of science as) model pervading empirical approaches to the history and the philosophy of science in both the French and Anglophone contexts is wrongheaded: Canguilhem agrees with Bachelard’s view of science as normative, and of the philosopher as a judge presiding over the history of science. Secondly, I present Canguilhem’s critical presentism as both a refinement and an enlargement in scope of Bachelard’s normative presentism. As a consequence of this reformulation, the domain of historical epistemology is widened—with respect not only to other scientific domains but also to levels of scientificity other than those instantiated by sciences such as physics and mathematics. I conclude by showing how Canguilhem’s historiography is underpinned by ethical preoccupations concerning the “quantification” of normality, the determination of individuals by their milieu, and the mechanization of life—tendencies at play in both philosophy and the sciences and which Canguilhem criticizes via scientific concepts premised in a better grasp of their history.

In this chapter, I provide an overview of FoucaultFoucault, Michel’s major works from the 1950s and 1960s and discuss their approach to historiography. I then outline why Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is often misunderstood as purely descriptive and indifferent to scientific norms and the truth or falsity of statements. Contrary to this reading, I argue that Foucault’s archaeology not only appeals to but prominently addresses scientific norms and that it both widens and specifies the scope of BachelardBachelard, Gaston’s and CanguilhemCanguilhem, Georges’s historical epistemology by studying how true and false statements are possible against the background of what Foucault calls a positivitypositivity—the set of statements capable of bearing truth-value in a given historical moment. The apparent conflict between Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s normative historical epistemology, on the one hand, and Foucault’s archaeological analysis of discursive formations, on the other, is resolved if we track their shared concern with the present. I therefore highlight how Foucault’s elaboration of the idea of writing a “history of the present” in fact effectively recaptures fundamental aspects of Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s conception of recurrent history.

The work of Gaston BachelardBachelard, Gaston is often taken to exemplify French historical epistemology. Indeed, the latter is sometimes reductively identified with the former. In this chapter, I outline BachelardBachelard, Gaston’s epistemology, focusing chiefly on his account of mathematical physics as characterized by a twofold discontinuity: an epistemological rupture between scientific knowledge and common experience, on one hand, and between new theories and those they supersede on the other. Bachelard’s approach to the history of science is normative, since it considers contemporary science a norm that allows historians to read backwards into the past of a given discipline from the point of view of more recent developments. To illustrate this, Bachelard employed the metaphor of the tribunaltribunal (history of science as)—presenting history of science as a courtroom where, inhabiting the role of judge, the epistemologist rules on past science on the basis of current scientific values. In the conclusion of this chapter, I situate Bachelard’s approach in relation to more recent presentistpresentism historiographies.

This book explores the key conceptual stakes underpinning historical epistemology. The strong Anglophone interest in historical epistemology, since at least the 1990s, is typically attributed to its simultaneously philosophical and historical synthetic approach to the study of science. Yet this account, considered by critics to be an unreflective assumption, has prevented historical epistemology from developing a clear understanding and definition, especially regarding how precisely historical and philosophical reflections on the sciences should be combined. Thus, this book uniquely analyses how the problems and tensions inherent to the “contemporary” phase of historical epistemology can be clarified by reference to the “classical” French phase. The archaeological method of Michel Foucault, which draws on and transforms fundamental insights by Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, is used to exert an enduring influence on the field—especially through the work of Ian Hacking and his philosophical cum historical analyses of “styles of scientific reasoning”. Though this book is of great value to academic specialists and graduate students, the fact it addresses questions broad in scope ensures it is also relevant to a range of scholars in many disciplines and will provoke discussion among those interested in foundational issues in history and philosophy of science.

This paper aims to map out the links between style and science. Two moments mark the migration of style from the discursive field of the arts to that of the history and philosophy of science: the first occurred in the German-speaking world during the first decades of the twentieth century; the second appeared in an Anglo-American context between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, when the category of style became involved in the so-called “pluralist turn” in the history and philosophy of science. Taking this framework as its point of departure, the paper uncovers neglected contributions to the epistemology of style in order to foreground the concept of style as both a vector of inclusion (highlighting the plurality, historicity, and locality of scientific ways of knowing) and of exclusion (by generalizing the most correct ways of doing science and side-lining alternative ways of knowing).

Our goal in this paper is to reassess the relationship between norms and life by drawing on the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem, particularly some of his unpublished lectures about teratology and sexual determination. First, we discuss the difficulties Canguilhem identified in the introduction of life and sexuality as objects of philosophical reflection. Second, we reassess Canguilhem’s understanding of normativity as rooted in life and the axiological activity of the living. Third, we analyze how Canguilhem drew from past and contemporary teratology to conceive of the notions of anomaly and abnormality. Finally, we reconstruct Canguilhem’s analysis of a case of hermaphroditism, highlighting how he presented it as evidence that sexual determination is the result of a normative choice. One of the key contributions of the paper to scholarly literature on Canguilhem is a better understanding of his notion of choice, which was considered not the conscious and intentional act of a subject but rather an axiological activity of the living. We conclude by positioning Canguilhem’s concept of normativity and his belief that norms are produced by the living in relation to the naturalist/normativist divide in medicine.

Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening is often credited as being one of the first works to focus on the role of experimentation in philosophy of science, catalyzing a movement which is sometimes called the “philosophy of experiment” or “new experimentalism”. In the 1980s, a number of other movements and scholars also began focusing on the role of experimentation and instruments in science. Philosophical study of experimentation has thus seemed to be an invention of the 1980s whose central figure is Hacking. This article aims to assess this historical claim, made by Hacking himself as well as others. It does so first by highlighting how a broader perspective on the history of philosophy reveals this invention narrative to be incorrect, since experimentation was a topic of interest for earlier philosophers. Secondly, the article evaluates a revision of this historical claim also made by some philosophers of experiment: the rediscovery narrative, which frames Hacking and others as having rediscovered the work of these earlier authors. This second narratives faces problems as well. Therefore we develop a third narrative which we call the contextualist narrative. Rather than considering experimentation in an essentialist manner as a fixed research object that is either present or not in the work of specific authors, experimentation should be addressed through a narrative that asks in what way it becomes a philosophical problem for certain authors and for what purpose. Such contextualization enables a repositioning of Hacking’s philosophy of experiment in relation to the specific debates in which he intervened, such as the realism-antirealism debate, the Science Wars and the debate on incommensurability.