Research

What does EPISTYLE deal with?

This project aims to provide a comprehensive theoretical and historical discussion of the concept of style, in order to excavate the notion’s epistemological implications for current debates about scientific pluralism.

A growing number of historians and philosophers of science have touted the concept of style as more flexible than method in conceiving of the historicity and plurality of the ways of thinking, discovering, and experimenting that constitute the sciences. More broadly, style studies currently are located at the cutting-edge of research in fields as diverse as ethics, aesthetics, history of philosophy, anthropology, sociolinguistics, and computational stylometric analyses.

Despite such recent, multidisciplinary interest in style, a comprehensive discussion of the concept’s epistemological implications is still lacking; EPISTYLE aims to fill that gap. The project is motivated by the following key questions: what happened to the traditional concept of style when it was migrated from rhetoric and the arts to the fields of history and philosophy of science? Where does the idea of different ‘styles’ of knowing come from, and how did the idea of an historically evolving plurality of standards of scientific inquiry emerge? To what extent do the objects of the sciences owe their existence to the styles that have enabled them to emerge and rendered them thinkable? These transversal questions – cutting across the human, social, and natural sciences – have bearing on the “boundary questions” situated at the borders of the arts and sciences. While this project moves beyond the idea of a “binary economy,” or demarcation between the arts and the sciences, it also aims to keep sight of the specificity found in both.

Peter Galison & Caroline A. Jones, Picturing Science, Producing Art, 1998

The notion of “scientific styles” should allow us both to account for scientific plurality and historicity and to highlight that which emerges and accumulates specifically in the sciences. Working from this point of view, EPISTYLE will examine how mapping “scientific styles” allows us to identify the historical, practical, and pluralist turns of post-positivist philosophy of science without necessarily falling into the relativism and constructivism often taken to be implied by these turns. The project will reconstruct three salient historical moments, or turning points, with epistemological implications for the evolution of the concept of style.
 
First, it will focus on style as a tool for representing the world and analyse how contemporary theories of scientific styles engage current debates on realism and pluralism. Second, it will foreground the continued resonance of the entwined forms of visibility and of thinkability that animated German and French debates on perception at the turn of the 20th century. Third, it will trace the link between style and knowledge to the early modern period in order to discuss the emergence of “styles of thinking” as a substitute notion for “scientific method”.

Denis Kambouchner, Le style de Descartes, 2013
Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 1979 [1935]
Gilles Gaston-Granger, Essai d’une philosophie du style, 1968

What is EPISTYLE’s methodology?

The methodological framework for this project is historical epistemology. Located at the crossroads of the history of concepts and the history of practices, historical epistemology aims to account for the historical nature of knowledge without ipso facto debunking it. This methodology has been successfully applied to the study of the historical emergence of several categories organizing scientific thought and practices, including objectivity, probability, and abnormality. EPISTYLE intends to study style as one such organizing category, by tracing both its historical trajectory across different periods and intellectual fields and its conceptual preconditions.