Thinker · TH-0213
Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking was a Canadian philosopher of science who taught at Cambridge, Stanford and the University of Toronto and held a chair at the…
1936 – 2023 · Vancouver; Cambridge; Stanford; Toronto; Paris (Collège de France)
Traditions: Analytic
Ian Hacking was a Canadian philosopher of science who taught at Cambridge, Stanford and the University of Toronto and held a chair at the Collège de France. In Representing and Intervening (1983) he moved the realism debate from theories to experimental practice, proposing entity realism: we have good reason to believe in entities such as electrons when we can reliably manipulate them to investigate other things. He also wrote influential histories of probability and studies of how classifications of people change the people classified.
Key ideas
- Entity realism: experimental manipulation, not theoretical success, is the best ground for believing an unobservable entity exists; in his phrase, if you can spray them, they are real.
- One can be a realist about entities while remaining sceptical about the truth of the theories that describe them.
- Human kinds have looping effects: classifying people changes how they behave, which in turn changes the classification.
- Probability in its modern dual sense, both frequency and degree of belief, emerged historically around the mid-seventeenth century.
Major works
- The Emergence of Probability (1975)
- Representing and Intervening (1983)
- The Taming of Chance (1990)
- The Social Construction of What? (1999)
In the conversation
- Discussion Does ‘atom’ in my physics class refer to what Dalton meant by it?
- Discussion Hacking’s test for reality: if you can spray it, it’s real. Does that work for genes?
- Debate The replication crisis is a philosophical problem before it is a statistical one
- Discussion When a prediction changes what it predicts: reflexivity in my day job
- Discussion Does a diagnosis name a real condition, or a useful bundle of symptoms?
- Reading group Reading group: van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image, on realism and explanation
- Discussion Is “depression” one condition or several? A reader’s doubts
- Reading group Reading group: Pascal’s wager fragment and the pages around it, in French and English
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Ian Hacking takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 6.8.2 Scientific Realism Do electrons exist, or do they just work?