Ian Hacking 1936 – 2023
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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Canadian
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
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.”