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Making Up People. A Project of More than Three Decades
Abstract
In Chapter 4, Making up people. A project of more than three decades, I present the notions Ian Hacking uses to work in the human sciences. Hacking defines himself as a dynamic nominalist, insofar as he is interested in the interaction between classification and the classified individuals, and he vindicates Michel Foucault as antecedent of this nominalism, being interested in the essential role of history in the constitution of its objects, people and forms of behavior. Hence his idea of historical ontology, which deals with the ways in which the possibilities of choice and of being emerge from history and from making up people, that is to say, the ways in which a new scientific classification can make a new kind of people emerge. This interaction between classification and the classified individual results in what Hacking calls the looping effect of human kinds. But making up people, besides, takes place within an ecological niche. Given that in the kinds of the human sciences the aforementioned loop effect presents itself, Hacking proposes the existence of different classes of kinds. In order to illustrate this, I recuperate Hacking’s work process on this matter, departing from his original question about whether kinds of people are natural kinds.
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Rev.8.2—Thursday 12 th August, 2010, 11:20 This paper explores the meta-physics of natural kinds. I consider a range of increasingly ontologically com-mitted views concerning natural kinds and the possible arguments for them. I then ask how these relate to natural kind essentialism, arguing that essentialism requires commitment to kinds as entities. I conclude by examining the homeo-static property cluster view of kinds in the light of the general understanding of kinds developed.
On this occasion, and in this place, I feel that I ought, and am probably expected, to look back at the things which have happened to the philosophy of science since I first began to take an interest in it over half a century ago. But I am both too much an outsider and too much a protagonist to undertake that assignment. Rather than attempt to situate the present state of philosophy of science with respect to its past — a subject on which I’ve little authority — I shall try to situate my present state in philosophy of science with respect to its own past — a subject on which, however imperfect, I’m probably the best authority there is.
This lecture gives a proposed framework within which to think about making up people as well as the looping effect. It elaborates on the kinds of people that will not be discussed, such as those belonging to different classifications called ‘ethnic’. The focus of this lecture is in the ways the social, medical and biological sciences create new classifications and new knowledge. The engines of discovery and autism are two of the topics covered by the lecture.
‘Historical ontology’ is not, at first sight, a happy phrase. It is too self-important by half. I have always disliked the word ‘ontology’. It was around, in Latin, in the seventeenth century, naming a branch of metaphysics, alongside cosmology and psychology. Christian Wolff (1729) helped confirm it in use. He thought of ontology as the study of being in general, as opposed to philosophical reflection on individual but ultimate entities such as the soul, the world, and God. If, like myself, you are hard pressed to explain what a study of being in general would be, you can hardly welcome talk of ontology. In the twentieth century the word attracted significant philosophers such as Quine and Heidegger, but their pronouncements, in its name, were bizarre Think of Quine’s ‘To be is to be the value of a variable’. And yet, and yet: suppose we want to talk in a quite general way about all manner of objects, and what makes it possible for them to come into being. It is convenient to group them together by talking about ‘What there is’, or ontology. And if we are concerned with the coming into being of possibilities, what is that if not historical?
Some evil actions are public. Maybe genocide is the most awful. Other evil actions are private, a matter of one person harming another or of self-inflicted injury. Child abuse, in our current reckoning, is the worst of private evils. We want to put a stop to it. We know we can't do that, not entirely. Human wickedness (or disease, if that's your picture of abuse) won't go away. But we must protect as many children as we can. We want also to discover and help those who have already been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster. We are so sure of these moral truths that we seldom pause to wonder what child abuse is. We know we don't understand it. We have little idea of what prompts people to harm children. But we do have the sense that what we mean by child abuse is something perfectly definite. So it comes as a surprise that the very idea of child abuse has been in constant flux the past thirty years. Previously our present conception of abusing a child did not even exist. People do many of the same vile things to children, for sure, that they did a century ago. But we've been almost unwittingly changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our values and our moral codes accordingly.
Analytical table of contents Preface Introduction: rationality Part I. Representing: 1. What is scientific realism? 2. Building and causing 3. Positivism 4. Pragmatism 5. Incommensurability 6. Reference 7. Internal realism 8. A surrogate for truth Part II. Intervening: 9. Experiment 10. Observation 11. Microscopes 12. Speculation, calculation, models, approximations 13. The creation of phenomena 14. Measurement 15. Baconian topics 16. Experimentation and scientific realism Further reading Index.
The rosy dawn of my title refers to that optimistic time when the logical concept of a natural kind originated in Victorian England. The scholastic twilight refers to the present state of affairs. I devote more space to dawn than twilight, because one basic problem was there from the start, and by now those origins have been forgotten. Philosophers have learned many things about classification from the tradition of natural kinds. But now it is in disarray and is unlikely to be put back together again. My argument is less founded on objections to the numerous theories now in circulation, than on the sheer proliferation of incompatible views. There no longer exists what Bertrand Russell called ‘the doctrine of natural kinds’—one doctrine. Instead we have a slew of distinct analyses directed at unrelated projects.
Part I. Logic: 1. Logic 2. What is inductive logic? Part II. How to Calculate Probabilities: 3. The gambler's fallacy 4. Elementary probability 5. Conditional probability 6. Basic laws of probability 7. Bayes' rule Part III. How to Combine Probabilities and Utilities: 8. Expected value 9. Maximizing expected value 10. Decision under uncertainty Part IV. Kinds of Probability: 11. What do you mean? 12. Theories about probability Part V. Probability as a Measure of Belief: 13. Personal probabilities 14. Coherence 15. Learning from experience Part VI. Probability as Frequency: 16. Stability 17. Normal approximations 18. Significance 19. Confidence and inductive behaviour Part VII. Probability Applied to Philosophy: 20. The philosophical problem of induction 21. Learning from experience as an evasion of the problem 22. Inductive behaviour as an evasion of the problem.
Traducción de: Kant e l'ornitorinco Umberto Eco es, probablemente, la figura del campo de la semiótica más conocida por un público amplio. Una fama que deriva, en gran medida, del éxito de El nombre de la rosa (1980), su primera novela. En el campo de la ficción vienen luego El péndulo de Foucault (1988), La isla del día antes (1994) y Baudolino (2001). El nombre de la rosa fue llevado al cine por Jean-Jacques Annaud, en 1986. Ensayo donde se analizan los mecanismos de percepción del hombre desde la filosofía y la semiótica. Para ello, el autor analiza y estudia las fábulas protagonizadas por animales, y desde allí cuestiona la teoría del conocimiento.
The disunities of the sciences
- I Hacking
Ian Hacking. The philosopher of the present
- M Vagelli
The archaeology of Michel Foucault
- I Hacking
L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté
- M Foucault
Conversando con Ian Hacking
- AC Regner
The disunities of the sciences
- I Hacking
- P Galison
- D Stump
The looping effects of human kinds
- I Hacking
- D Sperber
- D Premack
- AJ Premack