Ian Hacking: 1936 - 2023
Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking died May 10, 2023. In his memory, we submit this column summarizing a few of his contributions to philosophy.
To start out with praise for famous men, we can note that Hacking’s stature in the philosophy of science can be summarized by association. Hacking’s introductions bless the opening of the most popular version of both Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions and Feyerabend’s Against Method - both of the two most controversial books in the field. I also say stature rather than structure: Hacking’s interests were quite different from Kuhn’s historicism or Feyerabend’s tedious recapitulation of Carlyle. It is that structure that we will attempt to draw here.
Hacking’s interest was in the human use of human beings. For Hacking, the rise of science was a rise in humanity’s self-understanding in a decidedly non-Hegelian sense: a rise in what humanity understood can be done. What ties the alchemists with the quantum chemists is that both participated in the growth of knowledge of what substance transformations can actually be done. This stance made Hacking one of the leaders of what came to be called the “New Experimentalism” and what Hacking called his Back To Bacon project. For Hacking, it was the laboratory which measured the incommensurabilities of Kuhn and Feyerabend. To do this, the laboratory could not be the ‘reified theorems’ of Bachelard, but rather a self-justifying field of considerable stability. Hacking created a new Historical Ontology, saying “What we accumulate are experimental techniques and styles of reasoning. Anglophone philosophy of science has too much debated the question of whether theoretical knowledge accumulates. Maybe it does not. So what? Phenomena and reasons accumulate.” (Historical Ontology, Hacking, 2002 emphasis in the original). New ways of doing and ways of seeing aren’t always knowledge, but neither are they always not-knowledge.
In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin overturned traditional ontology by discovering the world was not largely non-electrical, but actually teeming with charge. In the 20th century, Anglo-Philosophers of science were convinced that they were little Franklins, showing that the world was not non-theoretical, but rather teeming with concepts. We have already talked about how Hacking was the Lavoisier who used experiments to further break down science into its elements. But there was another aspect of Franklin’s science which fascinated Hacking. That was the science of statistics and demography. When applied to the nation, suddenly marriage, life and death became scientific objects when applied to large sections of humanity. “In fine”, wrote Franklin, “a Nation well regulated is like a Polypus; take away a Limb, its Place is soon supply'd; cut it in two, and each deficient Part shall speedily grow out of the Part remaining.”. This human use of human beings is close to Hacking’s work in the pure philosophy of science - especially since experimentalists spend as much time dealing with the theory of errors as they do with the special theories of their subject - but it also connects to the thorniest human use of human beings: politics.
In the philosophy of politics, Hacking was also an innovator. Along with his older contemporary John Rawls, Hacking made politics a part of so-called ‘analytic philosophy’. But where Rawlsians (and most non-’analytic’ philosophers) had politics as part of the normative part of his philosophy, Hacking had politics as part of the positive side. In The Emergence Of Probability and The Taming Of Chance, Hacking chronicled the rise of the kind of rule by numbers that characterizes the modern state.
Writing on the cusp of that rise, Hegel declared that he couldn’t believe the planets were dragged around the cosmos like a bunch of dumb children as the French materialist determinists had it. On the other side of the 19th century, Hacking quotes George Knapp making much the same complaint with two differences. First, for Knapp’s nip at the French schools, the boys being dragged around are not Mars and Jupiter but actual boys. Second, the laws pulling the boys around are not the certain laws of gravity but the stable laws of statistics. Franklin’s image of a self-healing society which overcomes the deadliest obstacles became what Hacking called ‘statistical fatalism’: if you reform one thief, another will just come after.
Just as the laboratory provides continuity through incommensurability, Hacking shows that it is the actual practice of biopower that creates continuity. As one example of how Hacking uses the practice of biopower as data for doing philosophy, we can look at his work on human kinds.
A human kind is, its proponents claim, a kind of natural kind. A kind is a set of individuals who all fall under some other predicate (which I will call the synthetic predicate) who also fall under at least one other predicate which is not analytically entailed by the defining predicate. Almost like a “type of guy,” where the icons by which you can identify one mean something about their behavior, or vice versa. A natural kind is a kind which is stable: the individuals don’t spontaneously fail to fall under the synthetic predicate. The notion of kind was introduced by Mill for a deflationary account of scientific method. The snub-nosed animals do not form a kind, by Mill’s lights, because they share no peculiarities save those analytic to being a snub-nosed animal. But being a mammal - at the time, meaning an animal which has mammary glands - is a kind because all mammals have four chambered hearts, a fact not analytic to having mammary glands.
But are there such a thing as human kinds in this sense? Mill is ambivalent, though he says that most conventional classifications - such as Christian or Mathematician - are not kinds. Hacking argued that further human kinds - Christian, Mathematician, Pervert - are intrinsically different from natural kinds. A human member of a kind can decide whether he wants to be part of that kind - or not! Hacking looks at the examples of Multiple Personality Disorder and Autism. People with these disorders can read the narratives he analyzes, and Hacking’s meta-analyses, and react to them. In principle, the members can adopt enough different behaviors that all synthetic predicates of the human kind disappear, demoting the kind to mere predicative set.
Anyone familiar with the LockPickingLawyer is aware of a simpler example. The LockPickingLawyer is a YouTuber who picks locks, usually locks produced en masse and usually locks with severe design flaws. One of his most common victims is MasterLock, a large lock making concern known for its inexpensive and low quality locks. In principle, MasterLock could watch this channel and change their behavior, which would fundamentally alter the inexpensive lock market. After watching a few videos, “MasterLock makes bad locks.” feels like a law of nature but it is not. And yet, this is how we treat much of mankind.
In his mature philosophy, Ian Hacking would take a different argument against human kinds. Hacking would move away from the importance of ‘natural kinds’ and the underlying ‘analytic’ notion of “knowledge as justified true belief” towards a Poppernian/Platonic theory of conjectural knowledge. I happen to agree with this way of evolving the new experimentalism. But more than that, I believe that Hacking’s work represents a model of how philosophers should engage with science and history. He has provided me with inspiration for some of the essays in this very online magazine. I know Alex can say the same as well. I hope his work will continue to flower by inspiring philosophers all over the world.