  Winsberg (2003) also makes use of Ian Hacking’s (1983, 1988, 1992) work on the philosophy of experiment. One of Hacking’s central insights about experiment is captured in his slogan that experiments have a life of their own’ (1992: 306). Hacking intended to convey two things with this slogan. The first was a reaction against the unstable picture of science that comes, for example, from Kuhn. Hacking (1992) suggests that experimental results can remain stable even in the face of dramatic changes in the other parts of sciences. The second, related, point he intended to convey was that ‘experiments are organic, develop, change, and yet retain a certain long-term development which makes us talk about repeating and replicating experiments’ (1992: 307). Some of the techniques that simulationists use to construct their models get credentialed in much the same way that Hacking says that instruments and experimental procedures and methods do; the credentials develop over an extended period of time and become deeply tradition-bound. In Hacking’s language, the techniques and sets of assumptions that simulationists use become ‘self-vindicating’. Perhaps a better expression would be that they carry their own credentials. This provides a response to the problem posed in 4.1, of understanding how simulation could have a viable epistemology despite the motley and autonomous nature of its inferences.