Historical Ontology by Ian Hacking (Harvard, 2002) borrows the phrase itself from Foucault. Whereas traditional ontology was conceived of in terms of atemporal substances or timeless essences, Hacking's concern is with 'the coming into being of the very possibility of objects', a concern of which he enquires rhetorically 'what is that if not historical' (p. 2). Here there is already a potential ambiguity; is it simply because something has an identifiable beginning in time that we call it historical, or are is it our approach to the object in terms of the discipline of history that identifies it as historical? Or both?

Note also Hacking's quasi-Kantian phrasing of the nature of his concern, particularly important because a few pages later he claims to be rejecting the transcendental approach. His rejection of it is clearly borne of sympathy with Foucault's concern to unite knowledge, power, and ethics, in which the relevant question about knowledge is always what one can do with it. The Foucaultian is interested, not in what we might call "the status of knowledge as such" (if this is even an admissable notion), but in whose knowledge (if anyone's) it is, and how it gets used. Given the politically-inspired and practically motivated character of Foucault's thought, this interest is perfectly intelligible, and there is nothing as such that is illegitimate about it. Hacking makes clear it is his own by saying that he is interested 'above all' in 'how these various concepts, practices [etc] which we can treat as objects of knowledge, at the same time disclose new possibilities for human choice and action.' (p. 4)

This is not my interest. It strikes me that the disclosure of such possibilities is rarely itself the result of such analysis, but is a far more spontaneous and dynamic process which it is difficult at best to try and second-guess. Nevertheless, if Hacking thinks he has found fertile ground there, he is welcome to plough it. My interest is in why Hacking should think his views license a picture of a 'hodgepodge of disunities among the sciences' (p. 4). One may wonder if something has not gone wrong here.

Certainly, there is great diversity, and plenty of disagreement over quite fundamental matters, in science today. But a 'hodgepodge' may be a little strong. While it is true that the concepts we use in science emerge in time(such as probability, which Hacking has traced the history of the idea of), the criteria these concepts themselves employ are not temporal, in the sense that they do not depend on their own historicity either in order that they may be useful or that they supply conditional standards of veracity. Of course, truth and falsity are relative to such concepts, but to demonstrate this undeniable truth is neither to undermine the concepts nor to dismiss truth and falsity.

Compare the problem of paradigms, whcih Hacking also discusses. In what is clearly a defensible sense of a 'paradigm', what is said to true or false may only be said to be strictly true or false in terms of the conditions it lays down. So in one sense, Aristotle is not merely an incorrect version of Newton; he is simply saying something 'incommensurable', as Kuhn would have it. But if this is taken to imply that Aristotle's geocentric theory was neither better nor worse than Newton's heliocentric one, for example, then it is clearly absurd.

Partly, this is because it denies the self-understanding of the agents involved, who as supporters of the Newtonian position took themselves to be refuting the Aristotelian one. Partly, also, it is because there is a continuity involved that transcends this self-understanding; the same phenomena (sun, moon, and stars) were the objects of explanation for both, and both believed in the possibility of offering such an explanation in mathematical terms. If theirs was not exactly the same enterprise, there is at least an intelligible continuity between them. The slow emergence of astronomy from astrology, for example, is part of this story. The consequence of denying that Aristotle was in some sense doing 'science' in his writings, even if he was admittedly not a 'scientist' in our modern sense of the term, is to render inexplicable why those who were becoming recognized as 'scientists' in the early modern period took the Greek-inspired enterprise of natural philosophy as their starting point at all.

Put another way, the shift from the Aristotelean to the Newtonian paradigm is a shift within a form of thought. Whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun around the earth was a question of immense practical importance thanks to the prevailing Christian cosmology, but it did not bear directly on the logical structure of scientific thought. Moreover, it seems meaningful to say that Galileo, Kepler, Newton & co. refuted the Aristotelian world-view, whereas saying that Newton & co. refuted Dante seems rather odder. How does one refute a poem in which an imaginative vision is laid out?