The analytical notion of ‘scientific style of reasoning’, introduced by Ian Hacking in the middle of the 1980s, has become widespread in the literature of the history and philosophy of science. However, scholars have rarely made explicit the philosophical assumptions and the research objectives underlying the notion of style: what are its philosophical roots? How does the notion of style fit into the area of research of historical epistemology? What does a comparison between Hacking’s project on styles of (...) thinking and other similar projects suggest? My aim in this paper is to answer these questions. Hacking has denied that his project of styles of thinking falls into the field of historical epistemology. I shall challenge his remark by tracing out the connections of the notion of style with historical epistemology and, more in general, with a tradition of thought born in France in the beginning of twentieth-century. (shrink)

In this chapter, I shall consider a number of connections between various ideas of the theory of styles of reasoning and the issue of the contingency and inevitability of science. By ‘contingency issue’ it is meant the question as to whether the history of a particular branch of our science could have taken a different route and provided results incompatible with those of our actual science. Apart from Hacking’s recent comments, the discussions on the contingency issue have not involved (...) the notion of style of reasoning. I will fill this gap in the literature by drawing some important implications for the issue of contingency from the theory of styles of reasoning that I have developed so far. I shall address four fundamental questions. First of all, in the next section I shall discuss to which extent the emergence of styles of reasoning at a certain point of history is a contingent circumstance. In the following section I shall ask whether the endurance of styles of reasoning was inevitable by tackling the connected question as to why the styles are long lasting. Afterwards, I shall focus on the growth of knowledge by dealing with questions such as: if a certain style of reasoning continues to be employed and if Q is a ‘live question’, is science bound to converge on a single answer to Q? Finally, on the basis of my previous reflections I shall look into the question of the convergence of science in the long run. The answers to these questions will rely on some basic assumptions of the theory of style of reasoning and imply a picture of the evolution of sciences in which both contingency and inevitability play a key role. (shrink)

Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening is often credited as being one of the first works to focus on the role of experimentation in philosophy of science, catalyzing a movement which is sometimes called the “philosophy of experiment” or “new experimentalism”. In the 1980s, a number of other movements and scholars also began focusing on the role of experimentation and instruments in science. Philosophical study of experimentation has thus seemed to be an invention of the 1980s whose central figure is (...) Hacking. This article aims to assess this historical claim, made by Hacking himself as well as others. It does so first by highlighting how a broader perspective on the history of philosophy reveals this invention narrative to be incorrect, since experimentation was a topic of interest for earlier philosophers. Secondly, the article evaluates a revision of this historical claim also made by some philosophers of experiment: the rediscovery narrative, which frames Hacking and others as having rediscovered the work of these earlier authors. This second narratives faces problems as well. Therefore we develop a third narrative which we call the contextualist narrative. Rather than considering experimentation in an essentialist manner as a fixed research object that is either present or not in the work of specific authors, experimentation should be addressed through a narrative that asks in what way it becomes a philosophical problem for certain authors and for what purpose. Such contextualization enables a repositioning of Hacking’s philosophy of experiment in relation to the specific debates in which he intervened, such as the realism-antirealism debate, the Science Wars and the debate on incommensurability. (shrink)

This chapter expounds Hacking’s project of styles of reasoning more systematically than Hacking himself has done, while the following chapters examine its philosophical implications. I shall show that, in addition to the statistical and the laboratory style described in Chap. 3, there exist other four styles of reasoning that share a set of common characterizing features: the algorithmic, the postulational, the historico-genetic and the taxonomic style of reasoning. All the differences notwithstanding, striking parallels can be drawn between these (...) different styles of reasoning: they emerged suddenly at certain points in time, crystallized around communities that shared certain standards of evidence and represent basic and inescapable forms of reasoning. Finally, I shall argue that there are other ways of thinking that differ from styles of reasoning in the sense of Hacking. What I consider a relevant difference is that only styles of reasoning have strong techniques of self-authentication, techniques that are intrinsic to their forms of reasoning. (shrink)

Why is there Philosophy of Mathematics at all? Ian Hacking. in Metascience (2015).

Ian Hacking (born in 1936, Vancouver, British Columbia) is most well-known for his work in the philosophy of the natural and social sciences, but his contributions to philosophy are broad, spanning many areas and traditions. In his detailed case studies of the development of probabilistic and statistical reasoning, Hacking pioneered the naturalistic approach in the philosophy of science. Hacking’s research on social constructionism, transient mental illnesses, and the looping effect of the human kinds make use of historical (...) materials to shed light on how developments in the social, medical, and behavioural sciences have shaped our contemporary conceptions of identity and agency. Hacking’s other contributions to philosophy include his work on the philosophy of mathematics (Hacking, 2014), philosophy of statistics, philosophy of logic, inductive logic (Hacking, 1965, 1979, 2001) and natural kinds (Hacking, 1991, 2007a). (shrink)

According to Ian Hacking’s Entity Realism, unobservable entities that scientists carefully manipulate to study other phenomena are real. Although Hacking presents his case in an intuitive, attractive, and persuasive way, his argument remains elusive. I present five possible readings of Hacking’s argument: a no-miracle argument, an indispensability argument, a transcendental argument, a Vichian argument, and a non-argument. I elucidate Hacking’s argument according to each reading, and review their strengths, their weaknesses, and their compatibility with each other.

, Looping Effects, the Self, Psychopathology.

A comparative analysis of the different notions of ‘ways of thinking’ introduced by philosophers. A guiding thread running through historical epistemology in an attempt to unify the researches of its authors. A comprehensive study of Ian Hacking’s ‘project of styles of reasoning’ and its implications for the relativism.

I reject both (a) inevitabilism about the historical development of the sciences and (b) what Ian Hacking calls the "put up or shut up" argument against those who make contingentist claims. Each position is guilty of a lack of humility about our epistemic capacities.

Ian Hacking instigated a revolution in 20th century philosophy of science by putting experiments (“interventions”) at the top of a philosophical agenda that historically had focused nearly exclusively on representations (“theories”). In this paper, I focus on a set of conceptual tools Hacking (1992) put forward to understand how laboratory sciences become stable and to explain what such stability meant for the prospects of unity of science and kind discovery in experimental science. I first use Hacking’s tools (...) to understand sources of instability and disunity in rodent behavioral neuroscience. I then use them to understand recent grass-roots collaborative open science initiatives aimed at establishing stability in this research area and tease out some implications for unity of science and kind creation and discovery in cognitive neuroscience. -/- . (shrink)

The analytical notions of ‘thought style’, ‘paradigm’, ‘episteme’ and ‘style of reasoning’ are some of the most popular frameworks in the history and philosophy of science. Although their proponents, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ian Hacking, are all part of the same philosophical tradition that closely connects history and philosophy, the extent to which they share similar assumptions and objectives is still under debate. In the first part of the paper, I shall argue that, despite the fact (...) that these four thinkers disagree on certain assumptions, their frameworks have the same explanatory goal – to understand how objectivity is possible. I shall present this goal as a necessary element of a common project -- that of historicising Kant's a priori. In the second part of the paper, I shall make an instrumental use of the insights of these four thinkers to form a new model for studying objectivity. I shall also propose a layered diagram that allows the differences between the frameworks to be mapped, while acknowledging their similarities. This diagram will show that the frameworks of style of reasoning and episteme illuminate conditions of possibility that lie at a deeper level than those considered by thought styles and paradigm. (shrink)

The paper discusses the version of entity realism presented by Ian Hacking in his book, Representing and Intervening. Hacking holds that an ontological form of scientific realism, entity realism, may be defended on the basis of experimental practices which involve the manipulation of unobservable entities. There is much to be said in favour of the entity realist position that Hacking defends, especially the pragmatist orientation of his approach to realism. But there are problems with the position. The (...) paper explores two issues that reflect negatively on Hacking’s version of the entity realist position. The first issue relates to the role of description in fixing the reference of theoretical terms. The second issue relates to Hacking’s claim that the argument for entity realism based on experiment is a different kind of argument from the standard argument for scientific realism based on the success of science. (shrink)

Ian Hacking defines a “style of scientific thinking” loosely as a “way to find things out about the world” characterised by five hallmark features of a number of scientific template styles. Most prominently, these are autonomy and “self-authentication”: a scientific style of thinking, according to Hacking, is not good because it helps us find out the truth in some domain, it itself defines the criteria for truth-telling in its domain. I argue that Renaissance medicine, Mediaeval “demonology”, and magical (...) thinking pass muster as scientific according to Hacking's criteria. However, application of these thought styles to the entities they introduce generates statements that logically imply a set of “ordinary” statements—or what Bernard Williams calls “plain truths”—which, contra the claims of autonomy and self-authentication, allows styles to be assessed from a style- independent perspective. Using Williams’ notion of plain truth, I show that Renaissance medicine, demonology, and magical thinking, in reality issue in many plain falsehoods. This confronts us with what I call Hacking's dilemma: either define stricter necessary conditions on being a style of scientific thinking, or concede that some styles albeit scientific are not as good at finding things out about the world as others. I make three suggestions to deal with the dilemma. (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta y analiza dos posturas acerca de las representaciones y clasificaciones científicas que Ian Hacking en ¿La construcción social de qué? denomina realismo o estructurismo inherente y nominalismo. La primera sostiene que las divisiones del conocimiento científico expresan o reflejan divisiones estructurales de la realidad a la que se refieren, en tanto que la segunda considera que toda división o estructura atribuida por la ciencia a la realidad se encuentra sólo en las representaciones mismas. Se sostiene que (...) tal criterio clasificatorio resulta pertinente y fructífero para las discusiones actuales acerca de la naturaleza del conocimiento científico, que pone de relieve diversas cuestiones profundas e intensamente debatidas a lo largo de la historia de la filosofía, y que el empleo del término “nominalismo” –a pesar de su polisemia y de ser poco utilizado actualmente en la filosofía de la cienciaes acertado por cuanto la discusión es en gran medida semántica, ya que se basa en dos concepciones contrapuestas acerca de la naturaleza del lenguaje humano. (shrink)

This article develops an account of local epistemic practices on the basis of case studies from ethnobiology. I argue that current debates about objectivity often stand in the way of a more adequate understanding of local knowledge and ethnobiological practices in general. While local knowledge about the biological world often meets criteria for objectivity in philosophy of science, general debates about the objectivity of local knowledge can also obscure their unique epistemic features. In modification of Ian Hacking’s suggestion to (...) discuss “ground level questions” instead of objectivity, I propose an account that focuses on both epistemic virtues and vices of local epistemic practices. (shrink)

The question as to whether Ian Hacking’s project of scientific styles of thinking entails epistemic relativism has received considerable attention. However, scholars have never discussed it vis-à-vis Wittgenstein. This is unfortunate: not only is Wittgenstein the philosopher who, together with Foucault, has influenced Hacking the most, but he has also faced the same accusation of ‘relativism’. I shall explore the conceptual similarities and differences between Hacking’s notion of style of thinking and Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. (...) It is a fact that whether or not the latter entails epistemic relativism is still a controversial question. From my comparative analysis, it will emerge that there are stronger reasons to conclude that Hacking’s notion of style leads to epistemic relativism than there are to reach the same conclusion in the case of Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. This point will be at odds with the anti-relativistic stance that Hacking has taken in his more recent writings. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which social scientific discourse and classification interact with the objects of social scientific investigation. I examine this interaction in the context of the traditional philosophical project of demarcating the social sciences from the natural sciences. I begin by reviewing Ian Hacking’s work on interactive classification and argue that there are additional forms of interaction that must be treated.

The question of how psychiatric classifications are made up and to what they refer has attracted the attention of philosophers in recent years. In this paper, I review the claims of authors who discuss psychiatric classification in terms referring both to the philosophical tradition of natural kinds and to the sociological tradition of social constructionism — especially those of Ian Hacking and his critics. I examine both the ontological and the social aspects of what it means for something to (...) be a mental disorder, and how the ontological status of these disorders hinges on social causation. Finally, I conclude by suggesting a way in which the biological and the social may be reconciled in an integrative model of variation in psychiatric disorder. (shrink)

Differenti sono i modi di conoscere che sono emersi nel corso della storia umana. Ian Hacking ha proposto una nozione, quella di "stile di pensiero" ("style of reasoning"), che fornisce un modello per caratterizzarli ed esaminare la loro genesi e il loro sviluppo. L'articolo mette in luce alcune implicazioni di questa nozione concernenti l'evoluzione del nostro sapere.

In this chapter I shall bring to the fore the family resemblances of the different notions of the concept of ‘ways of thinking’ that I have introduced in the previous chapter. For example, I shall compare Hacking’s styles project with Daston and Galison’s study on objectivity as well as with other projects such as Fleck’s, Kuhn’s and Foucault’s. Thanks to these comparative analyses, I shall identify points where all these projects support one another. I shall also provide a model (...) for studying objectivity that incorporates the notions of Fleck, Foucault, Kuhn and Hacking. Used together, these notions provide a more profound understanding of how objectivity emerges. Furthermore, I shall propose a layered diagram that maps the differences between the notions of thought style, episteme, paradigm and style of reasoning. Finally I shall highlight two philosophical issues, relativism and contingency, connected with the concept of ‘ways of thinking’ in all its different notions. I shall argue that this issue is particularly controversial in the case of Hacking’s notion. (shrink)

This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘interactive kinds’ first identified by Ian Hacking. An interactive kind is one that is created or significantly modified once a concept of it has been formulated and acted upon in certain ways. Interactive kinds may also ‘loop back’ to influence our concepts and classifications. According to Hacking, interactive kinds are found exclusively in the human domain. After providing a general account of interactive kinds and outlining their philosophical significance, I argue that they (...) are not confined to the human realm, but that they can also occur elsewhere. Hence, I conclude by arguing that interactive kinds pose a challenge to scientific realism about kinds by making it difficult to make a distinction between real and non-real kinds. (shrink)

This paper looks at three ways of addressing probabilism’s implausible requirement of logical omniscience. The first and most common strategy says it’s okay to require an ideally rational person to be logically omniscient. I argue that this view is indefensible on any interpretation of ‘ideally rational’. The second strategy says probabilism should be formulated not in terms of logically possible worlds but in terms of doxastically possible worlds, ways you think the world might be. I argue that, on the interpretation (...) of this approach that lifts the requirement of certainty in all logical truths, the view becomes vacuous, issuing no requirements on rational believers at all. Finally, I develop and endorse a new solution to the problem. This view proposes dynamic norms for reasoning with credences. The solution is based on an old proposal of Ian Hacking’s that says you’re required to be sensitive to logical facts only when you know they are logical facts. (shrink)

The idea that in human history it is possible to recognize distinct ways of thinking is widespread in the literature. Sometimes, instead of the phrase ‘ways of thinking’, other labels are used, such as ‘forms of thought’, ‘modes of thinking’, ‘ways of knowing’, ‘ways of reasoning’, ‘mental attitudes’ or ‘worldviews’. At any rate, it is possible to say that there is a concept, that of ‘ways of thinking’, which has played a crucial role in philosophy at least since the Enlightenment (...) and has acquired considerable weight with the emergence of a French tradition in philosophy of science called historical epistemology. This concept appears in different versions, as if they were species of the same genus. In this chapter, I shall outline its history, from Vico to Hacking and beyond, and I shall show how and why its different species have been introduced. My account provides a guiding thread running through philosophy of science that unifies the researches of important authors such as Lévy-Bruhl, Brunschvicg, Metzger, Koyré, Fleck, Foucault, Kuhn, Hacking and others. This guiding thread is mainly constituted by the project of historicizing Kant’s a priori by replacing it with a given notion of ‘ways of thinking’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility‐space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past exhaust the metaphysical options . This essay argues that both (...) of these assumptions should be rejected. It develops as an alternative an irrealist account of history, a view based in part on work by Leon Goldstein and Ian Hacking. On an irrealist view, historical claims ought to be treated as subject to the same conditions and caveats that apply to any theory of empirical or scientific knowledge. Irrealism argues for pasts as made and not found. The argument emphasizes the priority of classification over perception in the order of understanding and so verification. Because nothing a priori anchors practices of classification, no sense can be attached to claims that some single structure must or does determine what events take place in human history. Irrealism denies to realism the very intelligibility of any imagined view from nowhere, that is, a determinately configured past subsisting sub specie aeternitatis. A plurality of pasts exists because constituting a past always depends to some degree on socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience. (shrink)

Epistemic relativists often appeal to an epistemic incommensurability thesis. One notable example is the position advanced by Wittgenstein in On certainty (1969). However, Ian Hacking’s radical denial of the possibility of objective epistemic reasons for belief poses, we suggest, an even more forceful challenge to mainstream meta-epistemology. Our central objective will be to develop a novel strategy for defusing Hacking’s line of argument. Specifically, we show that the epistemic incommensurability thesis can be resisted even if we grant the (...) very insights that lead Hacking to claim that epistemic reasons are always relative to a style of reasoning. Surprisingly, the key to defusing the argument is to be found in recent mainstream work on the epistemic state of objectual understanding. (shrink)

Until now, philosophical debate about human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has largely been limited to its ethical dimensions and implications. Although the importance and urgency of these ethical debates should not be underestimated, the almost undivided attention that mainstream and feminist philosophers have paid to the ethical dimensions of hESC research suggests that the only philosophically interesting questions and concerns about it are by and large ethical in nature. My argument goes some distance to challenge the assumption that ethical (...) considerations alone must be foregrounded in philosophical discussions about hESC research by introducing a critical stance on the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie and condition it. A central aim of the paper is to show how Foucault's insights into knowledge-power, taken in combination with Hacking's claims about styles of reasoning, can make these assumptions evident, as well as cast light on their potentially deleterious implications for disabled people. Arguing in this way also enables me to draw out constitutive effects of research on stem cells, that is, to indicate how the discursive practices surrounding research on stem cells, as well as the technology itself, contribute to the constitution of impairment. (shrink)

This is a sequel to my paper, ‘What is Scientific Realism?’, which appeared in an earlier issue of this journal (Sankey, 2000a). A number of papers by other authors on topics relating to scientific realism have followed in subsequent issues. In this paper I revisit some of the themes developed in my earlier paper in the light of these later papers. I begin by restating the key ideas of the earlier paper. Next, I mention a number of afterthoughts which I (...) have had since the appearance of the paper. I then offer some comments on three of these subsequent papers. I hope these comments advance the discussion by clarifying and developing a number of key points. (shrink)

Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse. This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in this setting, any (...) updating rule that satisfies a few reasonable conditions will have the same feature. The conclusion that fine-tuned life provides evidence for a multiverse is hard to escape. (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 highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. It features eleven essays on scientific objectivity from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy of science, history of science, and feminist philosophy. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities. Taken individually, the essays supply new methodological tools for theorizing what is valuable in the pursuit (...) of objective knowledge and for investigating its history. The essays offer many starting points, while suggesting new avenues of research. Taken collectively, the essays exemplify the very virtues of objectivity that they theorize—in reading them together, the reader can sense various anxieties about the dangerously subjective in our age and locate commonalities of concern as well as differences of approach. As a result, the volume offers an expansive vision of a research community seeking a communal understanding of its own methods and its own epistemic anxieties, struggling to enunciate the key problems of knowledge of our time and offer insight into how to overcome them. -/- (Contributors: Alex Csiszar, Scott Edgar, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Sandra Harding, Moira Howes, Paolo Savoia, Judy Segal, Joan Steigerwald, and Alison Wylie). (shrink)

This paper concerns the recent revival of entity realism. Having been started with the work of Ian Hacking, Nancy Cartwright and Ronald Giere, the project of entity realism has recently been developed by Matthias Egg, Markus Eronen, and Bence Nanay. The paper opens a dialogue among these recent views on entity realism and integrates them into a more advanced view. The result is an epistemological criterion for reality: the property-tokens of a certain type may be taken as real insofar (...) as only they can be materially inferred from the evidence obtained in a variety of independent ways of detection. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos' conception of the history of science is explicated with the purpose of replying to criticism leveled against it by Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking, and others. Kuhn's primary argument is that the historian's internal—external distinction is methodologically superior to Lakatos' because it is "independent" of an analysis of rationality. That distinction, however, appears to be a normative one, harboring an implicit and unarticulated appeal to rationality, despite Kuhn's claims to the contrary. Lakatos' history, by contrast, is clearly the (...) history of a normatively defined discipline; of science and not scientists and their activities. How such history can be written, the historiographic and critical tools available for its construction, and its importance as history, are considered in detail. In an afterword, the prevalence of Lakatos' treatment of history in philosophical discussion is indicated: A related approach is shown to arise in social contract theory. (shrink)

This chapter examines the legacy of Kuhn’s Structure for normative philosophy of science. As an argument regarding the history of 20th century philosophy of science, I contend that the main legacy of Structure was destructive: Structure shifted philosophy of science away from addressing general normative philosophical issues (e.g., the demarcation problem, empirical testability) towards more deflationary and local approaches to normative issues. This is evident in the first generation of post-Structure philosophers of science in the 1980s and 1990s, who adopted (...) a pluralist approach to HPS. As a metaphilosophical argument regarding the methods adopted in HPS, I argue that there are a plurality of legitimate philosophical methodologies for inferring normative claims from historical cases. I frame this argument as a response to Pitt’s dilemma of case studies. I reject Pitt’s dilemma for its presupposition of an unrealistic and unfruitful standard (viz., epistemic certainty) for assessing HPS arguments and its analysis of philosophical methodology at the level of individual arguments. Pitt’s dilemma is most usefully understood as identifying potential points of criticism for HPS arguments. -/- The chapter begins with an examination of Kuhn’s normative philosophy of science in Structure and his position that historical cases provide evidence for philosophical claims. Kuhn’s philosophical methodology is insufficiently articulated, and his utilization of case studies is subject to objections (viz., interpretative bias, hasty generalization) implied by Pitt’s dilemma. I subsequently examine four post-Kuhnian methodological perspectives: (1) Ian Hacking’s particularism, (2) Helen Longino’s practice-based approach, (3) Michael Friedman’s neo-Kantianism, and (4) Hasok Chang’s complementary science. These views suggest alternative methodological strategies in HPS for addressing normative issues. I conclude by articulating some outstanding methodological challenges for the pluralist tradition of HPS—associated with the Stanford and Minnesota schools of philosophy of science—that emerged in the 1980s and remains influential. (shrink)

This paper advocates a new reading of Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction. According to Ian Hacking, this famous problem conveys a “pure nominalism”, as it grounds Goodman’s denial regarding the existence of natural kinds. While this interpretation is somewhat convincing, it suffers the major flaw of not corresponding to what Goodman himself understood by “nominalism”. Nominalism, in a goodmanian sense, is indeed primarily a technical demand, which stems from the so-called “calculus of individuals”. I argue that this mereological (...) definition of nominalism allows to understand the new riddle of induction afresh. As a result, Goodman’s riddle is “hyper-nominalist”, i.e., nominalist in a distinct and stronger sense than what Hacking suggested. (shrink)

(1) In the first part of this paper, I review Chomsky's meandering journey from the formalism/mentalism of Syntactic Structures, through several methodological positions, to the minimalist theory of his latest work. Infected with mentalism from first to last, each and every position vitiates Chomsky's repeated claims that his theories will provide useful guidance to later theories in such fields as cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. With the guidance of his insights, he claims, psychologists and neuroscientists will be able to avoid (...) costly dead-end lines of research. -/- (2) This never happened. As I have shown, this never could have happened. (See Johnston, 2018). What has happened, instead, is that current neurolinguistic research (with the arguable exception of the now-dated Lemma Model of Willem Levelt) proceeds without reference to Chomsky. It also wholeheartedly rejects the mentalism of the associated Language of Thought theory of Jerry Fodor. (See Johnston, 2018). -/- (3) I make this argument in the first part of this paper. I would also like to point out that most of my argument was developed in 1972, when I was a graduate student. I know of no other sustained criticisms of Chomsky at that time, and certainly none along the lines I had developed back then. -/- (4) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science. When I was a graduate student, philosophy of science was dominated by an attempt to describe a methodology common to all the specific sciences, i.e. Hempel’s deductive-nomological model. These days, Hempel’s emphasis on the methodological unity of science has been rejected by such “dis-unity” philosophers of science as Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Nancy Cartwright (see Cat, 2021). -/- (5) I view this change as the swing of a pendulum or, to change the metaphor, a journey from one end point of a continuum to another. As the level of abstraction at which one tries to describe scientific method is raised, the descriptions become increasingly general. Whether or not unity-of-science theories become so general as to be vacuous, is ultimately a subjective judgment. And so I expect that philosophers will eventually become tired of increasingly specific “close to the workbench” descriptions of how scientists work, and begin to turn back to methodological “big pictures”, finding in them powerful abstractions rather than empty irrelevancies. -/- (6) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science, which I would situate somewhere between the “unity” and “dis-unity” accounts. However, I am not a scientist. My own views about scientific method have three origins: -/- (6a) my work as a graduate student from 1966 until I passed my comprehensive exams in 1973 (at a different university); -/- (6b) reading every issue of Scientific American from 1972 until nearly 2000, (at which point I continued to read it only sporadically, since I concluded that, around that time, it had evolved from a serious science magazine to a popular science magazine); and -/- (6c) my three-year immersion in the cognitive neuroscience of language after I retired, based on repeated study of and note-taking for (Banesh & Compton, 2018), (Kemmerer, 2015), several other books and, finally, numerous articles not hidden behind a paywall. -/- So, as always with my writings: caveat emptor. (shrink)

‘Why does language matter to philosophy?’ is the name of a minor classic by Ian Hacking published in 1975. It’s a good question. Among the many charges laid against academic philosophy, one of the more familiar is that it concerns itself excessively with verbal or ‘merely semantic’ questions, at the expense of the real questions of philosophy. And yet those who have made a serious attempt to engage with philosophical problems quite soon finds themselves grappling with the very words (...) they use to formulate the problems. (shrink)

Arguments pro and contra convergent realism – underdetermination of theory by observational evidence and pessimistic meta-induction from past falsity – are considered. It is argued that, to meet the counter-arguments challenge, convergent realism should be considerably changed with a help of modification of the propositions from this meta-programme “hard core” or “protecting belt”. Two well-known convergent realism rivals – “entity realism” of Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking and John Worrall’s “structural realism” – are considered. Entity realism’s main drawback is (...) fundamental laws underestimation. As for structural realism, its limitation of theoretical propositions by pure structural ones is ineffective. One always can transform propositions about objects into propositions about structures and vice versa. Both conceptions are kinds of “metaphysical revisionism” that tries to reformulate the good old convergent realism propositions using more decent language and applying ad hoc modifications of the solutions first obtained within the anti-realist epistemological meta-programmes. It is stated that to overcome the troubles of convergent realism one has to turn from classical or “metaphysical” realism to nonclassical or “internal” one and to coherent theory of truth. Internal realism has no troubles in solving the problem of empirically-equivalent theoretical descriptions and historical meta-induction problem, but gets the problem of scientific knowledge objectivity instead. Where does this objectivity come from? One of the answers is proposed by the scientific knowledge growth model elaborated by Rinat Nugayev and by Peter Galison. Each paradigm is a local viewpoint determined by the peculiarities of a culture into which its creator . was submerged. However, the meeting of the different paradigms leads to their interaction; as a result, the crossbred theoretical objects are constructed. Through these systems the infiltration of one paradigm on the other’s domain takes place. After the old paradigms’ grinding the new ones emerge that reconcile to each other much better than the old ones. Scientific theories reconcile results in elimination of many contingent details. In the process of competition more universal components survive. It is demonstrated that the process of objective knowledge genesis takes place in modern superstring theory too. The list of its drawbacks is rather long; it is clear that the theory cannot pretend on the role of the Theory of Everything. Nevertheless the process of argumentation pro and contra convergent realism – underdetermination of theory by observational evidence and pessimistic meta-induction from past falsity – are considered. It is argued that, to meet the counter-arguments challenge, convergent realism should be considerably changed with a help of modification of the propositions from this meta-programme “hard core” or “protecting belt”. It is stated that to overcome the troubles of convergent realism one has to turn from classical or “metaphysic” of quantum field theory and general relativity interpenetration have already begun. (shrink)

This article uses the case study of ethnobiological classification to develop a positive and a negative thesis about the state of natural kind debates. On the one hand, I argue that current accounts of natural kinds can be integrated in a multidimensional framework that advances understanding of classificatory practices in ethnobiology. On the other hand, I argue that such a multidimensional framework does not leave any substantial work for the notion “natural kind” and that attempts to formulate a general account (...) of naturalness have become an obstacle to understanding classificatory practices. (shrink)

Para favorecer la interacción disciplinar y recuperar la dimensión práctica del conocimiento matemático en la escuela secundaria, Yves Chevallard plantea la necesidad de introducir en los programas de estudio la matemática mixta. La matemática mixta, cuyo apogeo tuvo lugar en Europa entre los siglos XVI y XVIII, se propone el abordaje de problemas surgidos por fuera de la propia matemática valiéndose de nociones mecánicas -como la de centro de gravedad y fuerza centrífuga- y del empleo de variados instrumentos para realizar (...) las construcciones requeridas. En este trabajo consideramos a la matemática mixta en la cultura matemática de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII y, en dicho contexto, presentamos dos casos de la práctica matemática de G. W. Leibniz en los que la investigación matemática involucra el diseño de máquinas. La consideración de tales casos permite situar a la matemática mixta, siguiendo la terminología de Ian Hacking, en un terreno medio entre representar e intervenir. El terreno medio entre representar e intervenir es un valle fértil donde la matemática aporta a, y se nutre de, una multiplicidad de otros dominios. También es una vía de acceso para historizar el conocimiento matemático, destacando las condiciones materiales para su desarrollo y el importante rol de los problemas. Palabras clave: Práctica matemática, Resolución de problemas, Siglo XVII, Máquinas, Cultura material. (shrink)

Paleontological evidence suggests that human artefacts with intentional markings might have originated already in the Lower Paleolithic, up to 500.000 years ago and well before the advent of ‘behavioural modernity’. These markings apparently did not serve instrumental, tool-like functions, nor do they appear to be forms of figurative art. Instead, they display abstract geometric patterns that potentially testify to an emerging ability of symbol use. In a variation on Ian Hacking’s speculative account of the possible role of “likeness-making” in (...) the evolution of human cognition and language, this essay explores the central role that the embodied processes of making and the collective practices of using such artefacts might have played in early human cognitive evolution. Two paradigmatic findings of Lower Paleolithic artefacts are discussed as tentative evidence of likenesses acting as material scaffolds in the emergence of symbolic reference-making. They might provide the link between basic abilities of mimesis and imitation and the development of modern language and thought. (shrink)

Debates in the philosophy of science typically take place around issues such as realism and theory change. Recently, the debate has been reformulated to bring in the role of experiments in the context of theory change. As regards realism, Ian Hacking’s contribution has been to introduce ‘intervention’ as the basis of realism. He also proposed, following Imre Lakatos, to replace the issue of truth with progress and rationality. In this context we examine the case of the vitalism — reductionism (...) debate in biology inspired by the works of Indian physicist-turned-biologist Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), in the early twentieth century. Both camps had their characteristic hardcores. Vitalists led by John S. Burdon-Sanderson and Augustus D. Waller accepted religious metaphysics to support their research programme, which ultimately degenerated. Bose worked more with the ideals of science such as Occam’s razor, large-scale systematization of phenomena and novel prediction. I argue that his religious metaphysics, instead of acting as a protective shield, helped him to consolidate his position and allowed further problem shift resulting in a research programme that involved consciousness too. His research programme remains relevant even today. (shrink)

The traditional emphasis on the physics of the very small is questioned, and the suggestion made that a crucial test of contributions to the philosophy of science ought to be their applicability to areas which are more representative of the scientific enterprise. Life science is cited as just such an area. It is quantum physics, rather than biology, which nurtures anti-realism. The most respected anti-realism today is that provided by Bas C van Fraassen; and the persuasiveness of his "Constructive Empiricism" (...) is attested to by the failure of avowed realists, such as Ian Hacking, to distance themselves very far from van Fraassen's ideas. A detailed critique of van Fraassen is presented with particular attention paid to his ideas on scientific explanation - the question of whether good explanations are true explanations being one which tends to divide realist and anti-realist. The conclusion is reached that, while realism raises - and fails to answer - a number of philosophical questions, the anti-realism provided by Bas van Fraassen is no better at answering those questions. Moreover, it is argued, van Fraassen's ideas lack plausibility as a description of science and the attitudes of scientists - particularly when attention is shifted from physics to biology. Finally, a number of suggestions are made as to how the philosophical questions posed by realism might be answered in the future. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: With this article, I advance a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability. I argue that Foucault’s insights offer the most astute tools with which to engage in this intellectual enterprise. Genealogy, the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously introduced and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work, demonstrates that Foucault’s historicist approach has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for analyses of disability than his critics in disability studies have thus far recognized. I show (...) how a feminist philosophy of disability that employs Foucault’s technique of genealogy avoids ahistorical, teleological, and transcultural assumptions that beleaguer much work in disability studies. The article also situates feminist philosophical work on disability squarely in age-old debates in (Eurocentric) Western philosophy about universalism vs. relativism, materialism vs. idealism, realism vs. nominalism, and freewill vs. determinism, as well as contributes to ongoing discussions in (Western) feminist philosophy and theory about (among other things) essentialism vs. constructivism, identity, race, sexuality, agency, and experience. (shrink)

Quine’s writings on indeterminacy of translation are mostly abstract and theoretical; his reasons for the thesis are not based on historical cases of translation but on general considerations about how language works. So it is no surprise that a common objection to the thesis asserts that it is not backed up by any positive empirical evidence. Ian Hacking (1981 and 2002) claims that whatever credibility the thesis does enjoy comes rather from alleged (fictitious) cases of radical mistranslation. This paper (...) responds to objections of that kind by exhibiting actual cases of indeterminacy of translation. (shrink)

Practices – specific, recurrent types of human action and activity – are perhaps the most fundamental "building blocks" of social reality. This book argues that the detailed empirical study of practices is essential to effective social-scientific inquiry. It develops a philosophical infrastructure for understanding human practices, and argues that practice theory should be the analytical centrepiece of social theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. -/- What would social scientists’ research look like if they took these insights seriously? To (...) answer this question, the book offers an analytical framework to guide empirical research on practices in different times and places. The author explores how practices can be identified, characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts and how they might change over time and space. -/- The Constitution of Social Practices lies at the intersection of philosophy, social theory, cultural theory and the social sciences. It is essential reading for scholars in social theory and the philosophy of social science, as well as the broad range of researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities whose work stands to benefit from serious consideration of practices. (shrink)

The forceful impact of Michel Foucault’s work in the humanities and social sciences is apparent from the sheer abundance of its uses, appropriations, and refigurations. This article calls for greater self-conscious reflexivity about the relationship between our uses of Foucault and the opportunities afforded by his work. We argue for a clearer distinction between analytics and concepts in Foucault-inspired work. In so doing we draw on key moments of methodological self-reflection in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures and elsewhere. This distinction (...) helps identify different ways that Foucault might be put to productive use today as well as what can go wrong therein, a concern we develop with reference to Giorgio Agamben’s post-Foucaultian contributions to political theory. We are eager to open up a possibility that has been infrequently explored despite Foucault’s contemporary influence—-the idea that critique in and through Foucault is empirical critique. This idea can help facilitate a gain in reflexivity in the broader landscapes of contemporary theory, inquiry, and critique. (shrink)

The Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) is an argument put forward by proponents of theism, in which they attempt to make a case from Bayesian inference, that the [apparently] fine tuned constants of our universe is more likely given a theistic hypothesis, than a naturalistic one. Some naturalists argue that this is not the case given the Multiverse (MV) hypothesis (that our universe is one of a plurality in a broader multiverse). The MV hypothesis is rejected by theists who argue it commits (...) what Ian Hacking (1987) referred to as “the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy”. In this paper I will attempt to demonstrate [what I perceive as] the errors in logic made by theists first in positing that a life-permitting universe (LPU) is improbable under the naturalistic-single-universe (NSU) hypothesis, and subsequently the errors in arguing that the MV hypothesis commits what Ian Hacking (1987) referred to as “the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy”. First, I will attempt to demonstrate why an LPU is not improbable under the NSU. Second, I will attempt to demonstrate that if we ascribe a probability value to our LPU, we can directly infer either an MV or the existence of “Deeper Laws” (Barnes, 2020) from that probability value. (shrink)