Ian Hacking 1936 – 2023
Ian Hacking (1936 – 2023) was a Canadian philosopher of the Contemporary era, associated with Analytic Philosophy.
Ian Hacking was a Canadian philosopher of science whose work bridged the analytic and historical traditions in the philosophy of science. Trained at Cambridge under Wittgensteinian and Quinean influences, he held chairs at Toronto and at the College de France and produced a long series of books on probability, statistics, mental illness, and the historical formation of scientific concepts. The Emergence of Probability, The Taming of Chance, Representing and Intervening, and The Social Construction of What? combined careful historical scholarship with a philosophical attention to how new categories bring new kinds of people, things, and possibilities into being.
Ian MacDougall Hacking was born in Vancouver in February 1936. He took his bachelor's at the University of British Columbia in 1956, then moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a second bachelor's, master's, and in 1962 a doctorate under Casimir Lewy. He taught at British Columbia, Cambridge, and Stanford before settling at the University of Toronto in 1983; from 2000 to 2006 he held the chair of philosophy and history of scientific concepts at the Collège de France, the first anglophone elected to that institution.
His books include Logic of Statistical Inference (1965), The Emergence of Probability (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975), Representing and Intervening (1983), The Taming of Chance (1990), Rewriting the Soul (1995), Mad Travelers (1998), The Social Construction of What? (1999), and Historical Ontology (2002). He combined analytic philosophy of science with a Foucault-influenced historical method that he called 'historical ontology' or, in earlier work, the analysis of 'styles of scientific reasoning'.
Hacking is best known for his philosophical history of probability and statistics, his entrenched-realism defence of experimental practice ('if you can spray them, they are real'), and his account of the 'looping effects' by which classifications of human kinds change the behaviour of those classified, exemplified in his studies of multiple-personality disorder and transient mental illnesses. He died in Toronto in May 2023.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Canadian
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic Philosophy
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Probability is double-faced from the start: aleatory and epistemic.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Looping effects describe how classifications change those they classify.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Reasoning styles bring with them new ways of being a candidate for truth or falsehood.”
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Attributed to Ian Hacking:
“Statistics has helped to determine the form of laws of nature and what counts as a person.”
Ian Hacking by topic
Frequently asked about Ian Hacking
- When did Ian Hacking live?
- Ian Hacking was born in 1936 and died in 2023.
- Where was Ian Hacking from?
- Ian Hacking was a Canadian philosopher of the Contemporary era.
- What philosophical movements is Ian Hacking associated with?
- Ian Hacking was associated with Analytic Philosophy.
- What was Ian Hacking known for?
- Ian Hacking was a Canadian philosopher of science whose work bridged the analytic and historical traditions in the philosophy of science.
- How many quotes are attributed to Ian Hacking?
- There are 19 attributed quotations from Ian Hacking in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.