Hacking derives his 'styles of scientific reasoning' from A. C. Crombie's six-fold taxonomy of styles of scientific thinking

philosophy-of-sciencestyles-of-scientific-reasoninghackingcrombiemethodologycross-domain-bridge

Ian Hacking takes the word "style" directly from A. C. Crombie's title and reproduces Crombie's own six-fold list verbatim, rather than proposing an original taxonomy of his own. The words below are Crombie's, not Hacking's: Hacking introduces them with "He concluded an anticipatory paper with the words:" and closes the quotation with the citation "(Crombie 1981, 284.)" — so the list reaches this vault at one remove, quoted by Hacking from Crombie's 1981 paper, not from the 1994 three-volume study whose title supplied the word. The list: "the simple postulation established in the mathematical sciences, the experimental exploration and measurement of more complex observable relations, the hypothetical construction of analogical models, the ordering of variety by comparison and taxonomy, the statistical analysis of regularities of populations and the calculus of probabilities, and the historical derivation of genetic development." Each item names a method-type that recurs across an entire domain of inquiry's history — all of mathematics, all of experimental science, all of taxonomy, all of statistics, all of historical genetics — not a technique scoped to a pair of studies.

This grounds claim-hackings-styles-of-scientific-reasoning-does-not-name-vaults-bridge-category's scale mismatch in intellectual lineage rather than an idiosyncratic choice on Hacking's part: the domain-or-discipline scale at which "style" operates was set by Crombie, and Hacking inherits it along with the word. See entity-a-c-crombie and entity-ian-hacking.