Styles of Scientific Reasoning as Historiographical Metaphor: A Reply to Martin Kusch

Martin Kusch’s critique of the historical epistemology of the styles of scientific reasoning qualifies as one of the most important contributions in the last decade to the understanding of this historiographical approach, often considered as a second historicist turn in history and philosophy of science. However, his criticism has not yet received an adequate response and the opportunity has been thereby missed to improve this kind of methodology in history of science. In this chapter, I will argue that the shortcomings pointed out by Kusch result from assuming a realistic conception of the styles of reasoning, as if they were actually existing structures that vertebrate the history of science, and not so much heuristic and discursive tools aimed to the production of historical narratives. Following Arnold I. Davidson’s insight, my basic claim is that the styles of reasoning should be taken as a special kind of metaphor, a “historiographical metaphor”, whose purpose is to express the different ways of doing science and writing its history in a context of epistemological pluralism.