The reactions that science triggers on the people it studies, describes, or theorises about, can affect the science itself and its claims to knowledge. This phenomenon, which we call reactivity, has been discussed in many different areas of the social sciences and the philosophy of science, falling under different rubrics such as the Hawthorne effect, self-fulfilling prophecies, the looping effects of human kinds, the performativity of models, observer effects, experimenter effects and experimenter demand effects. In this paper we review state-of-the-art (...) research that falls under the remit of the philosophy of reactivity by considering ontological, epistemic and moral issues that reactivity raises. Along the way, we devote special attention to articles belonging to this journal's Topical Collection entitled “Reactivity in the Human Sciences”. (shrink)

Recent trends in the debate about natural kinds tend towards increasingly permissive and practice-oriented views. I argue that while these accounts—which I characterize using Boyd’s ([1991]) term ‘enthusiasm’—offer several helpful insights, they often lack the normative force that they want to have; that is, they cannot provide an account of what makes something a good or bad, better or worse, kind for scientific pursuits. I argue that such accounts can regain a minimal sense of normativity in two ways. The first, (...) which has already been widely embraced by theorists, is to index the appropriateness of a scientific kind to the domain within which it is situated. While this is a good solution, it is not clear how it can be applied in interdisciplinary and cross-domain research pursuits, which are increasingly common. The second way of regaining normativity—which is especially, but not exclusively, effective for such cross-domain pursuits—is to attend to the stage at which scientific research is occurring. (shrink)

Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society. -/- Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive (...) human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mecha- nisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

This paper addresses a philosophical problem concerning the ontological status of age classification. For various purposes, people are commonly classified into categories such as “young adulthood”, “middle adulthood”, and “older adulthood”, which are defined chronologically. These age categories prima facie seem to qualify as natural kinds under a homeostatic property cluster account of natural kindhood, insofar as they capture certain biological, psychological, and social properties of people that tend to cluster together due to causal processes. However, this is challenged by (...) the observation that age categories are historically unstable. The properties that age categories are supposed to capture are affected by healthcare and cultural developments, such that people are staying biologically, psychologically, and socially young for longer. Furthermore, the act of classifying people into age categories can bring about changes in their behaviors, which in turn alter the biological, psychological, and social properties that the categories are supposed to capture. Accordingly, I propose that age categories are best understood as interactive kinds that are influenced in dynamic ways by looping effects. I consider some implications of these looping effects for our classificatory practices concerning age, including how different disciplines may need to review the ways they define and use age categories in their inductive inferences. (shrink)

Reactivity is usually seen as a problem in the human sciences. In this paper I argue that in emancipatory activist research, reactivity can be an important tool. I discuss one example: the aim of mental decolonisation in indigenous activist research. I argue that mental decolonisation can be understood as the act of replacing harmful looping effects with new, emancipatory ones.

Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. (...) First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

Reflexivity is, roughly, when studying or theorising about a target itself influences that target. Fragility is, roughly, when causal or other relations are hard to predict, holding only intermittently or fleetingly. Which is more important, methodologically? By going systematically through cases that do and do not feature each of them, I conclude that it is fragility that matters, not reflexivity. In this light, I interpret and extend the claims made about reflexivity in a recent paper by Jessica Laimann. I finish (...) by assessing the benefits and costs of a focus on reflexivity. (shrink)

The phenomenon of interactive human kinds, namely kinds of people that undergo change in reaction to being studied or theorised about, matters not only for the reliability of scientific claims, but also for its wider, sometimes harmful effects at the group or societal level, such as contributing to negative stigmas or reinforcing existing inequalities. This paper focuses on the latter aspect of interactivity and argues that scientists studying interactive human kinds are responsible for foreseeing harmful effects of their research and (...) for devising ways of mitigating them. (shrink)