Ian MacDougall Hacking (born February 18, 1936) is a Canadian
philosopher specializing in the
philosophy of science
Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultim ...
. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the
Killam Prize for the Humanities and the
Balzan Prize, and been a member of many prestigious groups, including the
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada (french: Ordre du Canada; abbreviated as OC) is a Canadian state order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit.
To coincide with the cen ...
, the
Royal Society of Canada and the
British Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.
It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars s ...
.
Life
Born in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he earned undergraduate degrees from the
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thr ...
(1956) and the
University of Cambridge
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
(1958), where he was a student at
Trinity College Trinity College may refer to:
Australia
* Trinity Anglican College, an Anglican coeducational primary and secondary school in , New South Wales
* Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, a coeducational school in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, New ...
. Hacking also earned his
PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...
at Cambridge (1962), under the direction of
Casimir Lewy, a former student of
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian- British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is consi ...
.
He started his teaching career as an instructor at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
in 1960 but, after just one year, moved to the
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...
as an assistant professor. After working as a research fellow at Cambridge from 1962 to 1964, he taught at his alma mater, UBC, first as an assistant professor and later as an associate professor from 1964 to 1969. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1969 before shifting to
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
in 1974. After teaching for several years at Stanford, he spent a year at the
Center for Interdisciplinary Research in
Bielefeld, Germany, from 1982 to 1983. Hacking was promoted to Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...
in 1983 and University Professor, the highest honour the University of Toronto bestows on faculty, in 1991.
From 2000 to 2006, he held the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the
Collège de France. Hacking is the first Anglophone to be elected to a permanent chair in the Collège's history. After retiring from the Collège de France, Hacking was a professor of philosophy at
UC Santa Cruz, from 2008 to 2010. He concluded his teaching career in 2011 as a visiting professor at the
University of Cape Town.
Philosophical work
Influenced by debates involving
Thomas Kuhn,
Imre Lakatos,
Paul Feyerabend and others, Hacking is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science. The fourth edition (2010) of Feyerabend's 1975 book ''
Against Method,'' and the 50th anniversary edition (2012) of Kuhn's ''
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' include an Introduction by Hacking. He is sometimes described as a member of the "
Stanford School" in philosophy of science, a group that also includes
John Dupré,
Nancy Cartwright and
Peter Galison. Hacking himself still identifies as a Cambridge
analytic philosopher. Hacking has been a main proponent of a realism about science called "
entity realism Entity realism (also selective realism), sometimes equated with referential realism, is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism. It is a variation of realism (independently proposed by Stanford School philosophers Nancy ...
." This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards answers to the scientific unknowns hypothesized by mature sciences (of the future), but skepticism towards current scientific theories. Hacking has also been influential in directing attention to the experimental and even engineering practices of science, and their relative autonomy from theory. Because of this, Hacking moved philosophical thinking a step further than the initial historical, but heavily theory-focused, turn of Kuhn and others.
After 1990, Hacking shifted his focus somewhat from the natural sciences to the human sciences, partly under the influence of the work of
Michel Foucault. Foucault was an influence as early as 1975 when Hacking wrote ''Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?'' and ''
The Emergence of Probability''. In the latter book, Hacking proposed that the modern schism between subjective or personalistic probability, and the long-run frequency interpretation, emerged in the early modern era as an
epistemological "break" involving two incompatible models of uncertainty and chance. As history, the idea of a sharp break has been criticized, but competing 'frequentist' and 'subjective' interpretations of probability still remain today. Foucault's approach to
knowledge systems
A knowledge-based system (KBS) is a computer program that reasons and uses a knowledge base to solve complex problems. The term is broad and refers to many different kinds of systems. The one common theme that unites all knowledge based systems ...
and power is also reflected in Hacking's work on the historical mutability of psychiatric disorders and institutional roles for statistical reasoning in the 19th century. He labels his approach to the human sciences transcendental nominalism (also dynamic nominalism
[Ş. Tekin (2014)]
"The Missing Self in Hacking's Looping Effects"
or dialectical realism),
a historicised form of nominalism that traces the mutual interactions over time between the phenomena of the human world and our conceptions and classifications of them.
In ''
Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory'', by developing a historical
ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophy, philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, Becoming (philosophy), becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into Category ...
of
multiple personality disorder, Hacking provides a discussion of how people are constituted by the descriptions of acts available to them (see
Acting under a description Acting under a description is a conception of the intentionality of human action introduced by philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe.
G. E. M. Anscombe
Anscombe wrote that a human action is intentional if the question "Why?", taken in a certain sense (and ...
).
In ''
Mad Travelers'' (1998) Hacking provided a historical account of the effects of a medical condition known as
fugue in the late 1890s. Fugue, also known as "mad travel," is a diagnosable type of insanity in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles without knowledge of their identities.
Awards and lectures
In 2002, Hacking was awarded the first
Killam Prize for the Humanities, Canada's most distinguished award for outstanding career achievements. He was made a Companion of the
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada (french: Ordre du Canada; abbreviated as OC) is a Canadian state order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit.
To coincide with the cen ...
in 2004. Hacking was appointed visiting professor at
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the ed ...
for the Winters of 2008 and 2009. On August 25, 2009, Hacking was named winner of the
Holberg International Memorial Prize, a Norwegian award for scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology. Hacking was chosen for his work on how statistics and the theory of probability have shaped society.
In 2003, he gave the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities, and in 2010 he gave the René Descartes Lectures at the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS). Hacking also gave the Howison lectures at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...
, on the topic of mathematics and its sources in human behavior ('Proof, Truth, Hands and Mind') in 2010. In 2012, Hacking was awarded the
Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, and in 2014 he was awarded the
Balzan Prize.
Selected works
Books
Hacking's works have been translated into several languages. His works include:
* ''The Logic of Statistical Inference'' (1965)
* ''
The Emergence of Probability'' (1975)
* ''Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?'' (1975)
* ''Representing and Intervening, Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science'', Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1983.
* ''
The Taming of Chance'' (1990)
* ''
Scientific Revolutions'' (1990)
* ''
Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory'' (1995)
* ''
Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses'' (1998)
* ''The Social Construction of What?'' (1999)
* ''An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic'' (2001)
* ''Historical Ontology'' (2002)
* ''Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All?'' (2014)
Chapters in books
*
Articles
*
* 1979: "What is Logic?", Journal of Philosophy 76(6), reprinted in A Philosophical Companion to First Order Logic (1993), edited by R.I.G. Hughes
*
*
*
* 2007:
Root and Branch,
The Nation
''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper t ...
* 2012: "Putnam's Theory of Natural Kinds and Their Names is Not the Same as Kripke's",
Hurly-Burly 7: 129–149.
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
*
External links
Official WebsiteHacking, Ianin
The Canadian Encyclopedia
''The Canadian Encyclopedia'' (TCE; french: L'Encyclopédie canadienne) is the national encyclopedia of Canada, published online by the Toronto-based historical organization Historica Canada, with the support of Canadian Heritage.
Available f ...
Ian Hacking archival papersheld at th
University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hacking, Ian
1936 births
Living people
People from Vancouver
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American philosophers
Canadian philosophers
Collège de France faculty
Philosophers of language
Companions of the Order of Canada
Recipients of the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
Philosophers of science
University of British Columbia alumni
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
University of Toronto faculty
Stanford University Department of Philosophy faculty
Fellows of the British Academy
Analytic philosophers
Holberg Prize laureates