Editing Ian Hacking (section)

==Philosophical work<!--'Transcendental nominalism', 'Dynamic nominalism', and 'Dialectical realism' redirect here-->==
Influenced by debates involving [[Thomas Kuhn]], [[Imre Lakatos]], [[Paul Feyerabend]] and others, Hacking is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n3x198 |title=Historical Ontology |date=2002 |publisher=Harvard University Press |doi=10.2307/j.ctv1n3x198 |jstor=j.ctv1n3x198 |isbn=978-0-674-00616-4}}</ref> The fourth edition (2010) of Feyerabend's 1975 book ''[[Against Method]],'' and the 50th anniversary edition (2012) of Kuhn's ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'' include an Introduction by Hacking. He is sometimes described as a member of the "[[Stanford School]]" in philosophy of science, a group that also includes [[John Dupré]], [[Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)|Nancy Cartwright]] and [[Peter Galison]]. Hacking himself identified as a Cambridge [[analytic philosopher]]. Hacking was a main proponent of a realism about science called "[[entity realism]]."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://philarchive.org/archive/MILWIH |title=What is Hacking's Argument for Entity Realism?|author=Boaz Miller		|website=philarchive.org|access-date=27 June 2023}}</ref> This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards answers to the scientific unknowns hypothesized by mature sciences (of the future), but skepticism towards current scientific theories. Hacking has also been influential in directing attention to the experimental and even engineering practices of science, and their relative autonomy from theory. Because of this, Hacking moved philosophical thinking a step further than the initial historical, but heavily theory-focused, turn of Kuhn and others.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ian-hacking|title=Ian Hacking|last=Grandy|first=Karen|website=The Canadian Encyclopedia|access-date=June 10, 2016|archive-date=August 10, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160810074506/http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/ian-hacking/|url-status=live}}</ref>

After 1990, Hacking shifted his focus somewhat from the natural sciences to the human sciences, partly under the influence of the work of [[Michel Foucault]]. Foucault was an influence as early as 1975 when Hacking wrote ''Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?'' and ''[[The Emergence of Probability]]''. In the latter book, Hacking proposed that the modern schism between subjective or personalistic probability, and the long-run frequency interpretation, emerged in the early modern era as an [[epistemological]] "break" involving two incompatible models of uncertainty and chance. As history, the idea of a sharp break has been criticized,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Garber |first1=Daniel |authorlink1=Daniel Garber (philosopher)|last2=Zabell |first2=Sandy |date=1979 |title=On the emergence of probability |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41133550 |journal=Archive for History of Exact Sciences |volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=33–53 |doi= 10.1007/BF00327872|jstor=41133550 |s2cid=121660640 |access-date=August 20, 2022|url-access=subscription }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Franklin |first=James |date=2001 |title=The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1zDECQAAQBAJ |location=Baltimore |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |page=373 |isbn=0-8018-6569-7}}</ref> but competing 'frequentist' and 'subjective' interpretations of probability still remain today. Foucault's approach to [[Episteme|knowledge systems]] and power is also reflected in Hacking's work on the historical mutability of psychiatric disorders and institutional roles for statistical reasoning in the 19th century, his focus in ''[[The Taming of Chance]]'' (1990) and other writings. He labels his approach to the human sciences '''transcendental nominalism'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--><ref>See ''[[Transcendence (philosophy)]] and ''[[Nominalism]]''.</ref><ref>A view that Hacking also ascribes to [[Thomas Kuhn]] (see D. Ginev, Robert S. Cohen (eds.), ''Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science: Scientific and Philosophical Essays in Honour of Azarya Polikarov'', Springer, 2012, pp. 313–315).</ref> (also '''dynamic nominalism'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--><ref name="Tekin">Ş. Tekin (2014), [http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9332/1/Tekin%2C2012%2CMIT.pdf "The Missing Self in Hacking's Looping Effects"].</ref> or '''dialectical realism'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->),<ref name="Tekin"/> a historicised form of [[nominalism]] that traces the mutual interactions over time between the phenomena of the human world and our conceptions and classifications of them.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.thenation.com/article/root-and-branch?page=full|title=Root and Branch|newspaper=The Nation|issn=0027-8378|access-date=June 10, 2016|archive-date=March 4, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304025934/http://www.thenation.com/article/root-and-branch/?page=full|url-status=dead}}</ref>

In ''[[Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses|Mad Travelers]]'' (1998) Hacking provided a historical account of the effects of a medical condition known as [[Fugue state|fugue]] in the late 1890s. Fugue, also known as "mad travel," is a diagnosable type of insanity in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles without knowledge of their identities.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.psychiatryonline.com/content.aspx?aID=9708 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070928075634/http://www.psychiatryonline.com/content.aspx?aID=9708 |url-status=dead |archive-date=September 28, 2007 |title=Dissociative Amnesia, DSM-IV Codes 300.12 ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition ) |publisher=Psychiatryonline.com |access-date=November 28, 2011 }}</ref>