Ian Hacking, a Canadian philosopher widely acclaimed as a giant of modern thought for pioneering contributions to the philosophies of science, probability and mathematics, as well as his widespread insights on issues of race and mental health, died May 10 at a retirement home in Toronto. He turned 87.
His daughter Jane Hacking said the cause was heart failure.
In an academic career that spanned more than two decades as a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Toronto, following appointments at Cambridge and Stanford, Professor Hacking’s intellectual reach seemed to know no bounds. Because of his ability to span multiple academic fields, he was often described as a bridge builder.
“Ian Hacking was an interdisciplinary one-man department all by itself,” Cheryl Misak, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, said in a telephone interview. “Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists, as well as those working on probability theory and physics, thought he had important insights for their field.”
A lively and provocative writer, if often a highly technical one, Professor Hacking wrote several seminal works on the philosophy and history of probability, including “The Taming of Chance” (1990), which was named one of the best 100 non- fiction books of the 20th century. century by the Modern Library.
His many awards include the Holberg Prize, an award in recognition of an academic scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, law and theology, which he won in 2009. In 2000, he became the first English speaker to be tenured at the Collège de France, where he held the chair of philosophy and history of scientific concepts until his retirement in 2006.
His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: he abandoned the preoccupation with questions that philosophers had long been preoccupied with. Arguing that science was as much about intervention as it was about representation, we helped put experimentation at the center.
On such a question—whether unseen phenomena such as quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists—he argued for reality in the case of phenomena occurring in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford in which electrons and positrons were sprayed. in a ball of niobium to detect electrical charges. “As far as I’m concerned,” he wrote, “if you can squirt them, they’re real.”
His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, explored how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time and shaped the way we not only understand arcane fields such as quantum physics, but also everyday life.
“I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made our world dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with Public Culture magazine. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do – health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate – takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”
Author of 13 books and hundreds of articles, including many in The New York Review of Books and its London counterpart, he established himself as a formidable public intellectual.
Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that permeates all of his work is that “science is a human endeavor,” wrote Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway when Professor Hacking de Holberg- prize won. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why current science is the way it is, it is not enough to know that it is ‘true’ or confirmed. We need to know the historical context of its origins.”
Influenced by the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, Professor Hacking often argued that as the humanities developed, they created categories of people, and then people defined themselves as falling into those categories. This is how human reality is socially constructed.
“I have long been interested in classifications of people, how they affect the classified people, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People,” a 2006 article in The London Review of Books.
“I call this the ‘looping effect,'” he added. “Sometimes our sciences create kinds of people that, in a sense, didn’t exist before.”
In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting consequences — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”
Likewise, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” uses “a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the distinction between fact and value, whispering in your ear that what is normal is good too.” ‘.
In his influential writings on autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a wider range of people.
Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normal’ in a way that isn’t appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “Especially encourage the quirks. By no means criticize the quirks.
His emphasis on historical context also shed light on what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so time-limited that they may vanish as times change.
For example, he wrote in his book “Mad Travelers” (1998) that “hysterical fatigue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men transfixed by stories of exotic locations and the temptation of travel.
His book “Rewriting the Soul” (1995) explored the short-lived concern about the alleged epidemic known as multiple personality disorder, which arose around 1970 from “a few paradigmatic cases of odd behavior”.
“It was quite sensational,” he wrote, summarizing the phenomenon in the London Review article. “More and more unhappy people started to manifest these symptoms.” First, he added, “a person had two or three personalities. Within ten years the average number was 17.”
“This was reflected in the diagnoses and became part of the standard set of symptoms,” he argued, creating a looping effect that expanded the number of people apparently affected – to the point that Professor Hacking recalled visiting a “split bar” that catered. them, which he compared to a gay bar in 1991.
Within just a few years, however, multiple personality disorder was renamed dissociative identity disorder, a change that “was more than an act of diagnostic cleaning,” he wrote. “Symptoms evolve. Patients are no longer expected to come with a roster of completely different personalities, and they don’t.”
Ian MacDougall Hacking was born on February 18, 1936, in Vancouver, British Columbia, the only child of Harold Hacking, who managed freighter cargo and was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his service in the Canadian Army during World War II, and Margaret (MacDougall) Hacking, a milliner.
His intellectual inclinations were undeniable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he was reading the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were totally stunned.”
He studied mathematics and physics at the University of British Columbia and after graduating in 1956 went to Trinity College Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in 1962.
In addition to his daughter Jane, Professor Hacking is survived by another daughter, Rachel Gee; a son, Daniel Hacking; a stepson, Oliver Baker; and seven grandchildren. His wife, Judith Baker, died in 2014. His two previous marriages, to Laura Anne Leach and the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, ended in divorce.
Even in retirement, Professor Hacking retained his trademark sense of wonder.
In a 2009 interview with the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, held in the garden of his Toronto home, he pointed to a wasp buzzing near a rose, which he says reminded him of the nun physics principle locality, the direct influence of one object on another distant object, which was the subject of a speech he had recently heard given by the physicist Nicolas Gisin.
He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, whether the entire universe was governed by non-locality—whether “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”
“You should write about that,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My reigning word is ‘curiosity.'”