Philosophical debates about what is real often seem highly abstract, and they run in circles, with little progress being made. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, who died May 10, found new things to say about the reality of everything from multiple personality disorder to race to electrons. Hacking always based his ideas in the concrete world, focused on practical facts about scientific history and experimentation. For instance, his theory of “entity realism” takes a middle ground in an important debate, eschewing the question of whether scientific theories are true for the more moderate claim that only those entities which can be manipulated in scientific experiments, such as electrons, are real.
Hacking was attuned to the cultural effects of the scientific investigations he studied. Having written several books about the history of probability theory early in his career, he said in a 2012 interview that “our world [is] dominated by probabilities. We now live in a universe of chance.” Rather than thinking in terms of unambiguous causes and effects, our understanding of our lives and actions depends on risks and rewards, small chances of accidents or windfalls or medium-sized chances of inconveniences or minor benefits.
Perhaps the clearest example of Hacking’s interest in the effects of scientific research on culture, and of the effects of his own research on the broader intellectual culture, is in his work on social construction. The first sentence of his 1999 book, The Social Construction of What?, reads: “Social construction is one of very many ideas that are bitterly fought over in the American culture wars. … The phrase has become code. If you use it favorably, you deem yourself rather radical. If you trash the phrase, you declare that you are rational, reasonable, and respectable.” Later on, he wrote: “The use of [‘construction’] declares what side one is on.” Since the last phase of the culture wars in the nineties, the notion of social construction has remained controversial, but fortunes have flipped on the battleground. Today, it is likely viewed as more extreme to reject constructionism and more standard, at least in academia, to embrace it — to accept that the world is how it is in large part because humans have decided that it’ll be that way and that there’s nothing special about the categories we use to view the world: We could have picked other categories and ended up with a different world.
For Hacking, a claim that something is socially constructed tended to be part of a criticism of some sort of status quo. Insisting that some fact or circumstance is socially constructed involves insisting that it is not inevitably that way; we could change it. This is a bit different from saying it is simply not real. Many of the fiercest issues of contention in contemporary discourse can be put aside if these abstruse philosophical claims are correct. For example, some commentators like to throw around the assertion that the notion of race was created in the early Enlightenment era to explain or justify economic relations that were convenient for the people who had come up with the notion. But these same commentators are likely to assert just as strongly that race is real, by which they mean the social construct of race continues to have important effects in the world. Real things still, of course, can be changed. However, natural things can be changed, too. So at times, it’s not clear what the use of calling something “socially constructed” even is — a problem Hacking himself recognized.
In an essay for the London Review of Books, Hacking quoted Nietzsche to explain the thesis of “dynamic nominalism.” “Creating new names and assessments and apparent truths is enough to create new ‘things,’” he wrote. But Hacking was also careful about what sort of new things he had in mind. Using examples from psychiatry, he noted that while it might be up for debate whether there were people with multiple personalities or dissociative identities before the disorder was named, most people could agree that associating their experiences with a certain label would change the way people viewed themselves and perhaps how they acted.
As an academic, Hacking was trained at Cambridge and the University of British Columbia, and he spent most of his career at the University of Toronto. Born on Feb. 18, 1936, the Vancouveran philosopher of science had a wide-ranging scholarly oeuvre and also often wrote for the public, authoring over a dozen books. He is survived by two daughters, a son, and a stepson, as well as seven grandchildren. He is a widower to Judith Baker, who died in 2014. He spent his life researching questions about reality and experimentation in ways nobody else did.
In an era in which the culture war is stuck in a stalemate over what names to give to things, there seems to be little place left for a moderate view about the relationship between words and reality. Hacking was, with his vast historical knowledge and incisive analysis, that view’s most careful and canonical defender.
Oliver Traldi is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
