Ian Hacking

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Ian Hacking

Ian Hacking, CC

Order of Canada

The Order of Canada is Canada's highest civilian order and is the centrepiece of the Orders, decorations, and medals of Canada. Membership in the order is accorded to those who exemplify the order's Latin motto, taken from Epistle to the Hebrews 11:16, desiderantes meliorem patriam, meaning "They desire a better country."...
, FRSC

Royal Society of Canada

The Royal Society of Canada , now known as the RSC: Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada....
, FBA

British Academy

The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established by Royal Charter in 1902, and is a fellowship of more than 800 scholars....
(born February 18, 1936) is a Canadian philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of science

Philosophy of science

The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science. The field is defined by an interest in one of a set of "traditional" problems or an interest in central or foundational concerns in science....
.

Born in Vancouver

Vancouver

Vancouver is a coastal city and major seaport located in the Lower Mainland of southwestern British Columbia, Canada. It is the largest city in British Columbia and the second largest metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest region....
, British Columbia

British Columbia

British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's Provinces and territories of Canada and is famed for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu ....
, he has undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia

University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia is a Canada Public university research university with campuses in Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia....
(1956) and the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge , located in Cambridge, England, is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation university in the Anglosphere....
(1958), where he was a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Hacking also took his Ph.D. at Cambridge (1962), under the direction of Casimir Lewy

Casimir Lewy

Casimir Lewy was a Poles-born British philosopher. His father, Ludwig Lewy, was a doctor and died when he was a boy, so he grew up with his mother's family....
, a former student of Wittgenstein's.

He taught at UBC as an Assistant Professor, then an Associate Professor, spending some time teaching at the Makerere University College in Uganda

Uganda

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Ian Hacking, CC

Order of Canada

Royal Society of Canada

The Royal Society of Canada , now known as the RSC: Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada....
, FBA

British Academy

Philosophy of science

Vancouver

British Columbia

University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia is a Canada Public university research university with campuses in Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia....
(1956) and the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

Casimir Lewy

Uganda

The Republic of Uganda is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by Tanzania....
. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1969 before shifting to Stanford in 1974 . After teaching for several years at Stanford University

Stanford University

Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private university research university located in Stanford, California, California, United States....
, he taught for a brief time in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
(1982-1983). He became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public university research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated a mile north of the city's Financial District, Toronto on grounds that surround Queen's Park ....
in 1983 and University Professor (the highest honour the University of Toronto bestows on faculty) in 1991, while also lecturing at Princeton

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private university university located in Princeton, New Jersey, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and has the largest per-student Financial endowment in the world....
and Cambridge

Cambridge

The city status in the United Kingdom of Cambridge is a College town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies about 50 miles north of London....
on and off. From 2000 to 2006, he was the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France

Collège de France

The Coll?ge de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Ecoles....
.

Hacking is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science and was one of the important members of the "Stanford School" in philosophy of science, a group that also included John Dupré

John Dupré

John Dupr? is a professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Exeter.Dupre was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge and taught at Oxford, Stanford University and Birkbeck, University of London of the University of London before moving to Exeter....
, Nancy Cartwright

Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)

Nancy Cartwright Fellow of the British Academy is a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and the University of California at San Diego, and a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship....
, and Peter Galison

Peter Galison

Peter Louis Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and technology and Physics at Harvard University.Galison received his Ph.D....
. Despite his strong interest in historical revolutions in science (following the work of Thomas Kuhn), Hacking defends a realism about science, "entity realism

Entity realism

Entity realism is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism. Whereas traditional scientific realism argues that our best scientific theories are true, or approximately true, or closer to the truth than their predecessors, entity realism does not commit itself to judgments concerning the truth of scientific theories....
", albeit only on pragmatic grounds: the electron is real because human beings use it to make things happen. This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards the entities postulated by mature sciences but skepticism towards scientific laws. In his later work (from 1990 onward), his focus has shifted from the physical sciences to psychology, partly under the influence of the work of Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosophy, historian, intellectual, Critical theory and sociologist. He held a chair at the Coll?ge de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley....
. Foucault was an influence as early as The Emergence of Probability (1975), in which Hacking proposed that the modern schism between subjective or personalist 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. Foucault's approach to knowledge 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.

In 2002, he was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities, Canada's most distinguished award for outstanding career achievements. In 2004, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada

Order of Canada

University of California, Santa Cruz

The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public university, residential college university; one of ten campuses in the University of California....
for the Winters of 2008 and 2009.

Selected works

Hacking's works have been translated into several languages.

The 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)
Scientific Revolutions (1990)
Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995)
Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (1998)
The Social Construction of What? (1999)
An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001)
Historical Ontology (2002)

External links

in The Canadian Encyclopedia
The Canadian Encyclopedia

The Canadian Encyclopedia is a source of information on Canada. It is available online, at no cost. The Canadian Encyclopedia is available in both English and French and includes some 14,000 articles in each language on a wide variety of subjects including history, popular culture, events, people, places, politics, arts, First Nations, s...

Writings

to the The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs published in New York City....
to the London Review of Books
London Review of Books

The London Review of Books is a fortnightly United Kingdom literary and political magazine.The LRB was founded in 1979 during the year-long lock-out at The Times....
, in The Nation
The Nation

The Nation is a weekly United States periodical devoted to politics and culture, self-described as "the flagship of the left-wing politics." Founded on July 6, 1865 at the start of Reconstruction era of the United States as a supporter of the victorious North in the American Civil War, it is the oldest continuously published weekly magaz...
, October 8, 2007
, presented in Rethinking Interdisciplinarity.
, lecture delivered at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, in October 6, 2005, about Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French philosophy, historian, intellectual, Critical theory and sociologist. He held a chair at the Coll?ge de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley....
's The Order of Things
The Order of Things

The Order of Things is a book written by Michel Foucault and was published in 1966.The full title of the book is: Les Mots et les choses: Une arch?ologie des sciences humaines....
, Daedalus, Fall 2006, Vol. 135, No. 4: 81–95
, Common Knowledge, Vol. 11, No. 1. (2005), pp. 160-172.
, British Academy
British Academy

The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established by Royal Charter in 1902, and is a fellowship of more than 800 scholars....
Lecture, delivered 11 April 2006, published in Proceedings of the British Academy
Proceedings of the British Academy

Proceedings of the British Academy is a Serial published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press.Articles from Volume 51 onwards are available as Portable Document Format files for members, with the first page of every article and a select number of articles available at no cost....
151 (2007), 285-318