Thursday, May 11, 2023

Ian Hacking (1936-2023)

 Ian Hacking recently died. He is best known for his work in philosophy of science. Representing and Intervening was one of the most important works in the field in the 80s and 90s. It's sometimes said that Hacking, through this work and others, was responsible for the 'experimental turn' in philosophy of science; this is a bit exaggerated, since there was quite a bit of work on experiment before him and the 'experimental turn' has been, shall we say, a very slow turn, but it is true that more than anyone else he made a vivid and influential case for putting experiment front and center in philosophy of science. It is, I think, a case that keeps needing to be made, because philosophers and scientists alike have a tendency to slip back into talking about scientific inquiry as if it were purely a matter of theory, with experiment having little more than a checking role. In reality, many theories are fundamentally attempts to describe the underlying causal features of experiments, which are then generalized out to the rest of the universe; forgetting this leads down many a false road.

I interacted with Hacking a number of times. Mostly we never actually talked philosophy, although I vaguely remember a brief discussion about probabilities (perhaps historical conceptions of probability). Both The Emergence of Probability and The Taming of Chance are very good discussions of the philosophy of probability; it's been years since I've read either, but I remember liking Emergence in particular quite a bit.