Ian Hacking

Ian Hacking was a Canadian philosopher who held the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the College de France from 2000 to 2006, becoming the first Anglophone philosopher elected to a permanent position there. Hacking developed entity realism, a position in the philosophy of science holding that scientists are justified in believing in the reality of unobservable entities they can manipulate to intervene in the world, such as electrons used as tools in experiments, while remaining more cautious about the truth of the broader theories describing those entities. In his 1975 book The Emergence of Probability, Hacking examined the historical origins of modern probabilistic and statistical reasoning, arguing that the modern concept of probability, combining both a subjective, degree-of-belief sense and an objective, frequency-based sense, emerged as a genuinely new idea in the seventeenth century rather than having existed since antiquity. Hacking later developed the concept of dynamic nominalism, examining how human classifications of people, such as psychiatric diagnostic categories, can interact with and change the very people being classified, a process he called the looping effect. Hacking received numerous honors during his career, including the Killam Prize for the Humanities and election to the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.