Hacking, Ian

Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1975. 

Hacking, Ian, 1992. The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences. In Science as Practice and Culture, edited by Andrew Pickering, 29-64. Chicago University of Chicago Press. 

Hacking, Ian. Representing and Intervening Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1983. 

Hacking, Ian. 1983. "Was There a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930 " In M. Heidelberger, L. Kruger, 8c R. Rheinwald, eds. Probability since 1800 Interdisciplinary Studies of Scientific Development. Bielefeld, Germany B. K. Verlag. 

Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. 

My main source for a philosophy of science is Nancy Cartwright. In contrast to that of Arendt, the work of Cartwright is very much within a particular school of the philosophy of science, the Stanford school . This school includes Ian Hacking and John , whose work I also draw on. 

One essential precondition of this transformation was the discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described. In this respect, the production of statistical knowledge about the population—its age profiles, occupations, fertility, literacy, property ownership, law-abidingness (as demonstrated by crime statistics)—allowed state officials to characterize the population in elaborate new ways, much as scientific forestry permitted the forester to carefully describe the forest. Ian Hack-... 

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 17. Petty, a student of Hobbes, conducted the survey with an eye to accurate assessments of value and productivity. His theory of political economy can be found in Political Arithmetik, or A Discourse Concerning the Value of Lands, People, Buildings... (1691). 

Ian Hacking s philosophy of experimental realism integrated the epistemological sensibilities of the new empiricism into the practice-model of science by severing the theoreticist link between the truth of theories and a realist commitment to the existence of unobservable entities. As a form of entity realism , experimental realism allows experimentalists to be antirealists or instrumental-... 

See Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, 1995). 

In the present article, I hope to convince the reader that the relative neglect of this philosophical topic does not arise from any lack of interesting questions raised by the subject, but rather its eccentricity with respect to mainstream philosophy of science as it has evolved in the twentieth century. Imagining a philosophy of science that would place the relationship between pharmacy and chemistry at its centre would require imagining a history of the philosophy of science quite different from that shaped by thinkers like Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn or even Ian Hacking. 

Chemists, on the other hand, rarely question the reality of the tools with which they do their chemical work, be they natural or artificial. In this sense, Meyerson was completely justified in condemning the duplicity of chemists like Kekule. These nineteenth-century chemists avoided the metaphysical question of the existence of atoms while happily continuing to use them, like a plumber would use a spanner or a screwdriver. Yet their realism was definitely non-representational. In his 1983 introduction to the philosophy of science, Kepresencing and Intervening, Ian Hacking makes the crucial distinction between realism with respect to theories and realism with respect to entities . Chemists realism is an entity realism, although one that is better qualified as operational realism because of its dependence on the productive activity characteristic of this science. 

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