De inhoud van de stijl

The six styles of scientific reasoning as originally proposed by Alistair Crombie in 1994 are discussed (even though Ian Hacking, inspired by Crombie, already discussed them in 1982). The full list is: the deductive style, the experimental style, the style of hypothetical modelling, the taxonomical style, the statistical style and the historical-evolutionary style. Crombie obtained six styles in an inductive taxonomical manner: by showing that the enormous varieties of practicing science yields just six styles which cannot be meaningfully further reduced to each other. Hacking then showed that each style defines in its own way what counts as truth and as non-truth.
The article continues with an argument concerning the ontologies of the styles of scientific reasoning. It is shown that the deductive style harbours an ontology called “analogical” by the anthropogist Philippe Descola, meaning that there is an analogy between the above and the below. All other five belong to the naturalist ontology as defined by Descola.