Narrow and broad styles of scientific reasoning: A reply to O. Bueno

• Although thought-provoking, Bueno's narrow understanding of style has shortcomings.
• It does not specify the level at which investigation should be described.
• It does not improve on the analytical capabilities of Hacking's broad understanding.
• Like Hacking's understanding, it fails to capture the dynamical character of science.
• It does not account for some critical features of scientific practice.

In a recent paper, Otávio Bueno (2012) introduced a narrower understanding of Hacking's concept of styles of scientific reasoning. Although its ultimate goal is to serve a pluralist view of science, Bueno's proposal is a thought-provoking attempt at outlining a concept of style that would keep most of the original understanding's heuristic value, while providing some analytical grip on the specific details of particular scientific practices. In this reply, I consider solely this latter more proximate goal. More precisely, I assess whether or not Bueno's narrower understanding of styles could provide historians and philosophers of science with a workable unit to investigate particular transformations in scientific practices. While the author's proposal is certainly interesting overall, the usefulness of the unit it describes may be compromised by three shortcomings: 1° the extent to which the unit is meant to be narrower is indeterminate; 2° it does not improve much on the analytical capabilities of Hacking's concept; and 3° like Hacking's concept it is rather powerless to capture the dynamical character of particular scientific practices.