Science and the constitutive a priori: Ian Hacking's philosophy of scientific practice in the history of philosophy of science

In this dissertation, I consider the relations between the broadly Kantian idea of the constitutive a priori, understood as the conditions of the possibility for scientific judgement, and the appeal to actual scientific practice in recent history and philosophy of science. Philosophies of scientific practice, particularly Ian Hacking's, are critical of philosophy of science as the analysis of scientific theories. Using a reading of Hacking's philosophical interpretation of scientific practice to motivate the construction of a conceptual genealogy of the epistemological and logico-semantic concept of “theory”, I present a broad historical analysis of two important preconditions for the rise of such a conception. Both were related to the appropriation and criticism of Kant's theory of a priori knowledge. One was the rise of philosopher-scientists such as Helmholtz, Mach, and Hertz, and their interests in the nature of science as representation. Another was the development of a new conception of the role of the a priori in scientific knowledge (specifically that of constitutive but revisable formal structures). I argue that it is from the latter that the relevant conceptions of philosophical analysis and “theory” developed. I also argue that Hacking's incorporation of the constitutive a priori in his idea of “styles of reasoning” demonstrates that a concern with the constitutive a priori does not yield, by itself, theorocentrism. I present a detailed interpretation of “styles of reasoning” in the context of the history of the constitutive a priori and argue that it presents one of the most interesting ways to appropriate that very powerful philosophical idea.