Ian Hacking’s Contributions to Historical Reflection on Science

Abstract

This chapter explores the philosophical use that Ian Hacking makes of history, as well as the relevance of his contributions to historical reflection on science. Although Hacking is an analytical philosopher, his work has a truly historical character as a result of his support in Michel Foucault’s history of the present and his proposal of a style of scientific reasoning based on Alistair Crombie’s notion of style of scientific thinking. Starting from this idea of the history of the present, Hacking aims to understand how we think and why some concepts seem inevitable and necessary. The chapter begins by addressing his idea that a serious project of the philosophical analysis of concepts requires a history of words in their sites, whose aim is to understand not only what the concept is but also its history. Hacking analyzes different types of constitution, not only of concepts but also of objects, practices, and ideas, which can be thought of as investigations that, although diverse, form part of the same family under the general notion of historical ontology, which includes that of historical meta-epistemology, which corresponds in turn to the study of the organizing concepts used in epistemology. The exploration of these notions leads, finally, to the analysis of styles of scientific reasoning, insofar as they are the providers of the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of these objects and concepts. Interest in this question of historical conditions of emergence is a result of Foucault’s fundamental influence on Hacking’s thought.