Ian Hacking (1936–2023)

Ian Hacking died in Toronto on May 10, 2023. Sadly, his health had been declining since his wife, the philosopher Judith Baker, died in 2014. He never recovered from that blow.Ian left us a large body of beautifully written and highly influential work across an astonishing range of disciplines—probability theory and statistical inference, experimental physics, and the philosophy of mathematics, language, logic, classification, mental health, race, and poverty. When I was arguing with university administrators (I was one myself) who wanted to somehow legislate the breaking down of academic “silos,” I gave Ian as an example of the way to do it. He was a one-person interdisciplinary department, a phenomenon that cannot be engineered by higher-ups but is enabled by simply giving people freedom to roam. In his own memorial for Paul Feyerabend in this journal, Ian might well have been talking about himself when he remarked that “philosophers are allowed to get away with a very great deal.”1 Ian ran with that lack of constraint, following curiosity wherever it took him, leaving every domain he visited so much richer than he found it.The parallels do not end there. Feyerabend, Hacking wrote, “was against the idea that there is this one thing, science.” Feyerabend knew that the varied sciences “are only one part of human interests.”2 Ian knew this too. He also knew the sciences themselves (and mathematics and statistics) inside out. No one came anywhere near his ability to understand the various sciences in all their technical and subtle glory, while debunking the idea that they march along with a rational method to an objective truth. Ian was one of those rare philosophers of the time who eschewed the armchair and ventured into the domains about which he was philosophizing. His introductory books were gems for specialists as well as for the uninitiated. In my first year of graduate studies, I found a lifesaver in one of his first books, Logic of Statistical Inference (1965).3 However much it may have helped beginners like me, it is also a significant resurrection and defense of Ronald Fisher's notion of likelihood and its importance for statistical inference. The same holds for Ian's 1983 Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Yes, the book was introductory, but in it Ian also carved out a new position in the realism/instrumentalism debate about unobservable entities in scientific theories, coining the phrase “If you can spray them, then they are real.”4 If we can manipulate electrons and positrons by intervening with them in experimental contexts, they are real. The timing of Ian's book was perfect, as philosophy of science was in a rough patch, with both instrumentalism and the correspondence theory of truth failing to deliver the goods (neither could explain even a modicum of progress in scientific theories). Ian's book helped spawn a new field of experimental realism. The same year, his then wife Nancy Cartwright wrote her excellent How the Laws of Physics Lie, the two works forging a reading of science that lay between realism and instrumentalism.5There is an underlying theme to much of Ian's work, at least from the 1970s onward, which was when he started to immerse himself in the history of concepts, asking how they are formed and how they are transformative. The 1975 The Emergence of Probability shows how the concept of probability and hence the phenomenon itself came into existence, in turn shaping our lives and interactions.6 In 1990, he followed up with The Taming of Chance, investigating how the allied concept of chance came into being and began to permeate our concepts of free will and responsibility.7 The Modern Library named it as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Another foray into the probabilistic sciences was his spearheading of the Probabilistic Revolution project at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (the ZiF: Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) at Bielefeld in 1982.Ian then came up with the far-reaching idea that we construct not only concepts but also kinds of people: juvenile delinquent, single mother, sufferer of multiple personality disorder, autistic person. The mechanism (to put it more crudely than Ian would, for he was ever careful to be careful) is a “looping effect.” Classification is a human activity. We bring kinds of people into being by classifying them, picking out this or that trait among many, driven by changing needs, norms, facts, and values. When an individual is identified as a member of a kind, that very identification can change how a person acts and is perceived. We thus create a looping effect, where identities are strengthened and sometimes embraced by those identified, often with accompanying campaigns for recognition and rights.Ian's first book about kinds of people was the 1995 Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, in which he showed how, prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder).8 Once clinicians began to diagnose the disorder and speculate that some people invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse—and once the media began to talk about it—people commenced, in significant numbers, to use the concept to make sense of their own problems (and even conform to the disorder's official symptoms). Ian's other major exploration in this vein was Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (1998).9 This book examined a small epidemic of dissociative fugue between 1887 and 1909 that began in France with the “pathological tourism” of a factory worker, Jean-Albert Dadas, and fanned out throughout France, Italy, and Germany, and as far as Russia. Once his doctor wrote about Dadas's directionless, trance-state travels, this sort of fugue became a diagnosable illness. Ian traced the conditions that allowed the illness to come into existence, be legitimized by the medical community, and spread. He showed as well how aimless travel offered release to (mostly) men from the pathos of their lives.The looping effect he described in relation to multiple personality disorder and mad traveling could be seen in real time, Ian suggested, as the autism community strove to distinguish itself from that of the neurotypical. Autism narratives, he argued, are not merely histories or medical accounts of a given reality. They develop the very language in which to describe the experience of autism and hence forge the concepts in which to think about it. We can only wish we had Ian's care and wisdom to guide us through current debates about gender identity. No one could marry technical and analytical skill, humane insight, and scholarly depth as he could. As a consolation, we can be guided by something he wrote: “The word ‘normal’ uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”10Ian wrote about issues revolving around human kinds in all sorts of venues and from all angles—the careful case study, more resolutely philosophical material on just what social construction amounts to, and accessible pieces in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the London Review of Books. It was in the last that his brilliant review of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, appeared.11 It is strong and necessary medicine for anyone who uses the DSM to diagnose (which is to say, classify) people.Ian had an aversion to “isms” and “ists”—and to being classified himself as one or another kind of philosopher. Part of his reason was that he was interested in particular phenomena, not in setting out grand theories. I thought he was obviously a kind of pragmatist. The pragmatist also looks at our concepts not through the lens of abstraction and clean definition but as our evolving concepts, contingent on all sorts of historical accidents—the evolution of the human brain; the way language-users have posed questions and answered them; the human need to understand ourselves and our problems; the ways in which different technologies have developed in different societies at different times; power relations; political and economic aims. All these interests Ian shared with the pragmatists. But when I asked him to contribute to a volume I was editing, titled New Pragmatists, he got all contrarian and titled his piece “On Not Being a Pragmatist: Eight Reasons and a Cause”!12 I still think he really was one.Ian was also not inclined to classify himself as this-or-that kind of person. He was an iconoclast, even when asked whom to invite for a grand dinner after a grand lecture—his guest list was composed entirely of women, except for himself and the hosts. That was partly a political statement; partly a manifestation of his commitment to supporting women (think here of Lorraine Daston, Margaret Morrison, Margaret Schabas); and was partly born of a desire for a lively, non-stuffy evening. He succeeded quite magnificently.Ian was certainly a complex person. The drink could take hold of him. He could be difficult, drink or no drink. He could also be wonderful, most notably to those in less privileged positions, such as scholars in the developing world, graduate students, and youngsters. He was a superb host, serving his own homemade pies, having picked the berries himself. One could not leave Ian and Judith's house in the late summer without a large bag of fabulous heritage tomatoes, grown on the roof of their wonderful house in Toronto's old Annex neighborhood. His children let the Globe and Mail obituary writer know that he felt abandoned in a bullying boarding school as a child, when his father (awarded an OBE for his services during the war) was off working in the United Kingdom for more than a decade. I suspect that Ian's empathy for others, so manifest in his writing about human kinds, stemmed from his trying to understand himself.Ian won everything in sight. As an undergraduate in moral sciences at Cambridge (his first BA, from the University of British Columbia, was in mathematics and physics), he took both the Smith's Prize in Mathematics and the Gregg Bury Prize in Theology. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College Oxford, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Killam Fellow; he was awarded the Holberg Memorial Prize, the Balzan Prize, the Pierre Janet Prize, the Isaak Walton Killam Prize, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Gold Medal. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada. Le nouvel observateur named him one of the twenty-five greatest thinkers in the world. His thirteen books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. All this is well deserved. Ian's work is stunningly original and highly influential. Indeed, sometimes one feels bowled over by it. The insights in his last book, the 2014 Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All?, come at the reader so fast and furious that it is nearly impossible to keep up with him.13His career was as wide-ranging as his subject matters. He had held faculty positions at the University of British Columbia, Makerere University College in Uganda, the University of Cambridge, and Stanford University before he moved to the University of Toronto in 1983. After he retired from Toronto, he was the first Anglophone elected to a professorship at the Collège de France.While clearly a man in and of the world, Ian was nonetheless very Canadian. He was born in Vancouver, spent the largest portion of his professional life in Canada, and, in accordance with his wish, had his body flown from Toronto to Vancouver to be buried beside his father. He also had a distinctly Canadian sensibility when it came to questions of equality, diversity, and the state's role in improving the lot of all. Of course, a Canadian is a kind of person, a social and political construct, as Ian would have quickly reminded us.

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