Historical Ontology (review)

Ian Hacking is my candidate for The Great Canadian Philosopher of the twentieth century. To be sure, Marshall McLuhan has wider international renown, and Charles Taylor has impressively philosophized for Canada. However, Hacking is unique as a synthesist of the best of recent Anglo-American and French thought, which is probably the most natural role for a Canadian to occupy in the global intellectual conversation.

The book under review is mostly a set of book reviews, occasional pieces and lectures delivered over the past quarter-century, prefaced by an essay bearing the book's title.

The sequence of Hacking's institutional affiliations quickly marks the intellectual trajectory traversed in the book. From Vancouver, Hacking landed at Cambridge, where he excelled as an interpreter of probability theory and statistical inference. There he was swept up in the last wave of Wittgenstein's influence, namely, Michael Dummett's piecemeal approach to philosophical problems. He then imported this orientation to Stanford, where he became the father figure of the so-called turn to "disunity" in science studies, which stresses the context-specificity of existence claims in the sciences. Hacking's interest in the distillation of particular facts into statistical generalizations increasingly pushed his research agenda from the physical to the human sciences, where practices of collecting, excluding and normalizing most clearly bring "social facts" into existence. By the time Hacking returned to Canada as a university research professor at the University of Toronto, he was focused on the social construction of psychiatric phenomena, especially those allegedly grounded in traumatic events. Now, one might say, Hacking's career has concluded in a moment of "self-consciousness," since he occupies Michel Foucault's chair at the College de France.

Having followed Hacking's career (sometimes close-hand) from his Cambridge days, I am always amazed at the ease with which his Anglophone admirers detach his thought from its French, and specifically Foucaultian, moorings. Because these essays range over so many years and topics, it becomes painfully obvious — not least to Hacking — that Foucault is the one constant. It follows that Hacking's ultimate significance depends, at least partly, on Foucault's. Hacking's own verdict on Foucault is that, while wrong on many historical details, his overall account of the presence of epistemic ruptures and the micropolitics of disciplinary power is largely correct. This judgement makes Hacking an apostate from his philosophical heritage, though Dummett's influence helps Hacking translate Foucault into English.

While analytic philosophers can countenance, albeit reluctantly, the relativity of knowledge (i.e what counts as true), they find it difficult to grant the relativity of the knowable (i.e. what may count as true or false). That would be to suggest that certain conditions must be in place before certain things can exist and hence be talked about. The philosophical precedent for this view (which Hacking, of course, acknowledges) is Leibniz, who interpreted the conditions of the knowable as divinely inspired. However, it is more natural to interpret these conditions as "social" in the broadest sense, though Hacking tends to follow Dummett and the early Foucault in restricting the social to linguistic practices.

Specifically, Hacking describes the task of "historical ontology" as an historicized version of ordinary language philosophy, namely, the classification of the different "sites" in which a word appears. Besides this positive role, historical ontology also serves to demystify the legitimising force that words acquire when they are thought to stand for transcendent concepts. In this respect, Hacking stands with social constructivists in recent science studies and regrets the influence that the Platonist logician Gottlob Frege has had on analytic philosophy's theory of meaning. Hacking's fusion of Anglophone and Francophone sensibilities excels in revealing the blindspots and oversights of contemporary philosophical dogmas. His finesse is usefully contrasted with Richard Rorty's ham-fisted attempts to replace mainstream analytic philosophy with a watered-down version of American pragmatism.

For example, Hacking clearly sees that if one follows Quine in believing that indefinitely many translations are possible between any two sentences in any two languages, then it becomes...