Ian Hacking (1936–2023)

Hacking assesses "mad travelers," also known as people afflicted by wandering fugue, in the 19th century in Europe. He argues that despite being a popular and widespread diagnosis for decades, particularly in France, fugue -- and the number of people afflicted with it -- have all but disappeared in the last 100 years. This historical context provides a platform for his arguments that psychiatric diseases are socially constructed.

Deceptively dense given the short page count. Heavier on the show more philosophy than I had expected, but a very intriguing and thought-provoking read for those of us on the social science side. I originally heard about this book in the context of Thomas Szasz's Myth of Mental Illness, and while Hacking certainly does not identify so far on that side of the spectrum, those who react poorly to critiques of modern mental illnesses, such as multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder, will not care for the book. I think they should read it anyway, as we should all be critically examining our assumptions at all times, but I understand that they may not care for it. show less

Social Construction is a specter haunting research. Or at least it is one of the focal points of the Science Wars, between figures arguing the objectivity and integrity of science (usually particle physicists) and those arguing the opposite (usually sociologists or historians or anthropologists or some such). Certainly, Hacking was able to find 25 books of the form 'the Social Construction of X", (one for every letter of the alphabet, bar X), but what is socially construction and why does it show more matter?

As a philosopher of science, Hacking has a broader view than many of us in the trenches. His discussion of major arguments by Latour, Pickering, Kuhn, Lakatos, Quine, and Popper, to name a few of the protagonists is clear and enjoyable. This is a first rate literature review! I think that Hacking is on to something when he points out that this argument is in fact very old, stretching back to Aristotle and Plato, and more commonly invoked in arguments between Nominalists and Realists. The arguments over whether names and categories are arbitrary and human-imposed, or whether they parallel some deeper structure of the universe, are long-standing and likely unresolvable.

Hackings's major contributions in the book are an analysis of the whys and hows of Social Construction. He identifies a six point scale of construction, from least to most radical: historical, ironic, reformist, unmasking, rebellious, and revolutionary. Social construction tends towards radical formulations because it argues against the inevitability of what is, and that the world as we understand it would be better (more just, less oppressive, more joyful) if we rearranged society. A second part are criterion for judging how constructivist an argument is on scales of contingency--could it have developed differently, nominalism, and the importance of internal or external explanations for the stability of a fact.

Unfortunately, Hacking's own work, when it departs from a review of the literature, is far less compelling. He develops a theory of interactive and indifferent kinds. Interactive kinds are exemplified by mental disorders, and their presence in the world changes in accord with our knowledge of the kind. Indifference kinds are like fundamental particles, and do not care what we know of them. Kinds are probably the least rigorous categorizing schema imaginable, nothing more than "things that are alike, somehow." It is no mere linguistic coincidence that the psuedoscience of Genesis-inspired species is called Baraminology, the study of created kinds. Interactive kinds are trivially socially constructed; Hacking is less vocal on the social construction of the scientific objects of indifferent kinds. I'd judge "kinds" to be too floppy of a concept to do philosophy with.

The four case studies, on mental illness, child abuse, weapons, dolomite, and Captain Cook's death, are recycled from other work and not particularly well suited to philosophic theories in Chapters 1 & 3.

One big question, that is not adequately answered, is 'is social construction a worthwhile approach.' Hacking makes a compelling case that some of the leading theorists classified as 'social constructionists', such as Latour and Bloor, are no such thing. Social constructionist research is mostly based on shoddy readings of theories which say no such things, and therefore should be avoided as bad work. However, by linking things, the idea of things, and the social and material matrix in which the thing and its ideas are embedded, social construction opens an immense scope of potential questions and common conversations for scholars. As a research program (in Lakatos's terminology), social construction has been immensely successful. We should know how to use it more precisely. show less

Ian Hacking is a subtle, thoughtful, and often frustrating writer. In Rewriting the Soul, he takes a genealogical approach to Multiple Personality Disorder, epidemic at the time of writing in the early 1990s, and links it to political movements, 19th century French psychiatry, and the philosophy of self and memory. All science, particularly the human sciences like psychiatry, are informed by politics, but Multiple Personality Disorder is is more informed than most. The appearance of alters, show more personality fragments, is linked to recovered memories of abuse, either mundane child abuse at the hands of close relatives or esoteric (and entirely fictional) ritualized satanic abuse.

Hacking is n expert both in 19th century psychiatry and the intricacies of the modern multiple personality disorder movement, and ably shreds any commonplace notion of a singular self based on factual memory by showing all the ways in which this commonplace self breaks down at the fringes of medicine. To the question, "Is MPD real?" Hacking replies 'Yes. But it is a grave moral wound inflicted upon people by psychological entrepreneurs.' For a philosopher, a seeker after truth, the scanty evidentiary basis of MPD must be infuriating, especially given the way that it afflicts the lives and communities of people diagnosed with it. But I'm not sure that Hacking earns his normative critique, or an alternative formulation of the self not reliant on a fallible and fluid memory. show less

I hesitated to write a review of this book as I am neither a philosopher nor a mathematician. However, as the broad outlines of the arguments are accessible to someone who, like myself, has no more than high-school math, I felt justified in sharing the excitement and pleasure I experienced in reading Why is there a Philosophy of Mathematics at all? The book explores two themes:
1. The nature of mathematical proof
2. The applicability of mathematics (obviously to physics and economics, but show more also, as Hacking points out, across fields within mathematics itself).
The answer to the question Why is there a Philosophy of Mathematics is, I take it, that proof and applicability are issues that both mathematicians and philosophers feel compelled to return to again and again (notwithstanding the many practitioners who do not feel so compelled). In one sense, the answer is psychological: the astonishment generated by these two aspects of mathematics continually draws mathematicians and philosophers into a discussion that is, not itself, mathematical. It is, for lack of a better home, philosophical.

A historical perspective informs all the arguments. To summarize the thesis of the book: “A central aspect of the Ancient answer to the why question is none other than Proof. A central aspect of the Enlightenment answer is one notion of applying mathematics, namely Kant's (p 83).” Indeed, the entire book can be read as an essay in historical epistemology. And it is not history in a crude historicist sense: there is a full recognition that the actual course of historical development is the product of complex contingencies. One interesting example he cites is the successful development of mathematics in ancient China without the Greek (Euclidean) notion of proof. Thus raising the question of whether the latter is fundamental to foundations, or simply a cultural artifact.

Early on in the book the author suggests two different conceptions of proof that he terms the Cartesian and the Leibnizian. The former is associated with the sense of an “aha” moment and the concept of apodeictic certainty in the Critique of Pure Reason. The latter is associated with an algorithmic approach in which the steps are too numerous to be comprehended in a single “aha” moment. I have over-simplified. Nonetheless, one of the many fascinating parts of this work is the way Ian Hacking illustrates the manner in which the “gold standard” of proof is itself subject to the contingencies of history (though for every practitioner it must stand outside of history).

Ian Hacking teases out three different ways in which we can explore the concept of applicability. First, the applicability of one branch of mathematics to another; secondly, the application of mathematics to physics (with references to Wigner's famous essay: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences) and, lastly, mathematics and engineering. The latter is used as a further illustration of the complexity of historical contingencies (as in: compare and contrast Göttingen and the École Polytechnique).

In a work on the philosophy of mathematics, the question of the the putative existence of mathematical objects (platonism vs nominalism ) is unavoidable. Ian Hacking treats the question seriously and describes the major fault lines among modern mathematicians, taking care to reveal the complexities and subtleties of the question (among the archetypal representatives: Tim Gowers and Alain Connes). He uses a quotation twice (from Robert Langlands) to illustrate the ambiguities implicit in the way mathematicians approach the question. Speaking of the notion that “mathematics, and not only its basic concepts, exists independently of us. This is a notion that is hard to credit, but hard for a professional mathematician to do without.” (quoted on pages 41 and 256). Although the initial provisional answer to the question why is, Proof and Applicability, the perennial arguments over ontology suggest that they also form part of the answer. The author is well aware that the ontological question is probably irrelevant to the practice of mathematics...but, nonetheless, it keeps on reoccurring (moths to a light!)

There is something about the rapid, dense style of this book that is infectious: it effectively conveys the author's enthusiasms, interests and perplexities. If one test of a good book is that it inspires readers to explore further, then Why is there Philosophy of Mathematics at all? deserves the highest possible rating. And the book contains an excellent bibliography. show less