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Our academic professional societies do an absolutely abysmal job of informing their members of their colleagues’ deaths. Death notices and obituaries typically appear in these organizations’ bulletins months or even years after a scholar’s death.
Members of the Organization of American Historians must pay extra to receive a printed copy of the publication that lists deaths. You might think that historians, of all people, would do more to remember their parting.
Since few scholars are deemed sufficiently prominent to merit obituaries in the national press, their deaths go largely unacknowledged and unmourned.
The pandemic brought home this unsettling truth. I lost friends, teachers, former colleagues, professional acquaintances and scholars whose impact on my thinking was profound. I had no chance to attend their funerals or say goodbye. Ignorant and uniformed, I was heedless of the loss.
Every death is a moment for stock taking—an opportunity to recollect, reflect, reassess and ruminate. But all too often, those moments never occur. Think of all the deaths in my own field that went largely unnoticed during the pandemic: not of the biggest names in the profession like John Morton Blum, David McCullough, Gaddis Smith or Jonathan Spence, whose deaths were widely reported, but of Roger Daniels, István Deák, Lois Horton, Staughton Lynd, John Merriman, Gary Nash and Janice Reiff.
What prompts these morbid thoughts is the death of the great Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, whose insights into memory, probability, psychiatry and the social construction of reality had a profound impact on my generation of scholars across the humanities and social sciences, including many who had never actually read his many books and essays.
With a single exception, his passing went by without any serious reflection on his intellectual legacy, which included the single most important study of the social construction of reality.
That concept originally introduced by the sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in an extraordinarily influential 1966 book with that title, claimed that knowledge and meaning are not objective realities that are “out there,” but are, rather, created through a complex process that involves social interaction, social perceptions, cultural assumptions, attitudes and understandings, language and categories that are context specific.
Thus, every element in society, including conceptions of disability, gender, law, marriage, race, sexuality and ideas about guilt, justice and normality, is contrived, constructed and contested. To cite one example: child abuse was not new when the term was coined around 1961, but once the concept was formulated, it “had profound effects on the lives of countless children and their more or less culpable caretakers.”
Later scholars, including John R. Searle, Michel Foucault and Hacking himself, would elaborate on and complicate this insight.
At stake are among “the hoariest questions” in contemporary scholarship: “Is there a reality that exists independent of our attempts to know and describe it? How do we or can we, know it?”
I had myself unwittingly and inadvertently become a social and cultural constructionist back in the mid-1980s, when I suddenly realized that the family was not a timeless, unchanging entity but was, rather, a unit whose functions, roles, size, composition, boundaries and emotional and power dynamics were ever changing. This is a topic I traced in Domestic Revolution: A History of American Family Life.
I later applied that same realization to the history of childhood, in a book called Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, which chronicled a disjunctive succession of contrasting conceptions of childhood, including the Romantic, the industrial working-class, various immigrant childhoods and modern and postmodern childhood. Each set of ideas had a far-reaching impact on children’s play, schooling, peer relations and self-perception.
I also came gradually to recognize a number of insights that Hacking did so much to explicate:
- Historical ontology: This is the notion that the very ideas and concepts used to make sense of the world aren’t fixed, but originate at a particular moment in specific contexts and subsequently undergo profound transformations over time.
- Dynamic nominalism: This is the idea that the very categories, classifications and labels that authority figures create or popularize can lead individuals to conform to these categories and classifications, influencing their behavior and self-understanding.
- Looping effects: This term refers to the interplay between a society’s existing categories and classifications and people’s response to these classifications, which, in turn, drives changes in those categories.
Hacking’s thinking was heavily influenced by Foucault’s emphasis on the archaeology of knowledge, the myriad ways that power is exercised and the ways that cultural perceptions and understandings are shaped by language, discourse and social and scientific classifications. But Hacking also offered perhaps the most powerful and pointed challenge to the French philosopher’s ideas. In contrast to Foucault, Hacking stressed human agency: people’s ability to resist, modify and reinterpret socially and culturally imposed categories and classifications.
A scholar of remarkable breadth, Hacking not only wrote about epistemology, but the history of science, game theory, risk analysis, the nature of mathematical proof and many other topics. If one theme can be said to run through these works, it is the social and historical factors that shape understanding. History, in his scholarship, is not a story of linear progress, accumulated knowledge or improvements in methods, but a more contingent process in which ideas and new approaches are discovered and sometimes abandoned only to be later revived.
As a philosopher of science, he was especially interested in the formation, evolution and reformulation of scientific concepts, as well as the ways in which scientific knowledge is socially constructed and the reception of new concepts and methods. He was, in other words, as interested in the sociology of knowledge (how new ideas and approaches gain approval) as he is in the new conceptual models (or “paradigms” or “thinking caps”) that scientists within specialized domains embrace.
His scholarship on mental illness, including the development and social construction of the concept of multiple personality disorder, suggests that the ways in which the psychiatric categories used to understand mental phenomena not only shape diagnosis and treatment, but also subjective experience.
As a philosopher of mathematics and statistics, he focused on the evolution of statistical reasoning and probabilistic thinking and how these shaped scientific knowledge and practice and contributed to a shift from a world governed by fixed laws to one in which contingency and chance play a larger role.
As an ethicist, Hacking defended the idea associated with David Hume: that “Reason is or ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Rather than thinking about morality in terms of rights or utility, Hacking instead stressed the importance of people’s feelings, their widening sense of sympathy and fraternity and their expanding circle of those for whom they were concerned. Feelings—for example, the growing abhorrence toward slavery or animal cruelty or the exploitation of child labor—were then translated into arguments (involving respect and dignity) and implemented in legal codes.
Ian Hacking will be best remembered as a philosopher and historian of science, and some will ask why the history and philosophy of science, as opposed to science itself, matters. Hacking’s scholarship offers three pointed responses to that question.
The history and philosophy of science help us understand:
- Why certain methods, techniques, theories, practices, beliefs and concepts are embraced at particular moments in time.
- Science’s societal, political and cultural impact, which may be positive or negative, direct or metaphorical, transformative or disruptive or stabilizing and sustaining.
- The lessons and perspectives that can be extracted from past scientific discoveries and breakthroughs, which can inform future research and enhance our thinking about the interaction between scientifically informed categories, concepts and labels and societal roles and subjective experience.
We dismiss past scholarship at our peril. I think of ideas the way that Enobarbus thinks of Cleopatra:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety
Or as Laurence Binyon later wrote:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Certainly, within the humanities, there are ideas and works of scholarship that withstand the test of time. We are their heirs, and we are obligated to remember their authors.
