Inaugural lecture: Chair of Philosophy and History

of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France,

16 January 2001, Ian Hacking

Ernesto Treviño Ronzón

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1. Estilos de razonamiento
• How much do we create, and how much is fully
determined in ways that are totally independent of
ourselves? In the past decade we have debated this
using the slogan of ‘social construction’. I hope that we
shall soon put the slogan… (P. 1)
• In the sciences we may use many styles of reasoning.
• Even within mathematics there is still something
powerfully right about the distinction between
arithmetic and geometry, or, we might better say,
between algorithmic and combinatorial styles of
reasoning (P.2).
1. Estilos de razonamiento

• the most powerful style of reasoning, that which has

made possible the modern world […] is …the laboratory
style, which was emerging four centuries ago. P. 3
•  In ancient times men studied, observed and speculated
about phenomena. In modern times we make
phenomena, or isolate and purify them. P. 3.
•  In ages to come most of what Europe has exported to
the rest of the world, or extracted from it, will be
forgotten. Perhaps only one export will remain, and
that is the laboratory style of reasoning. P. 3
1. Estilos de razonamiento

•  There are many more styles of reasoning. One, to

which I have perhaps dedicated too much of my life,
is the statistical style.
• It has totally changed our feel of the daily world in
which we live, a world in which everything is cloaked
in probabilities, sex, sports, disease, politics,
electrons, cosmic collisions, the wave function. The
triumph of probability was engineered in the
nineteenth century and perfected in the twentieth.
1. Estilos de razonamiento: verdad y objetos
• I am concerned with ‘truth’ itself, or rather with the ways in
which a style of reasoning introduces new ways of finding out the
truth. I argue that each style introduces its own criteria of proof
and demonstration, and that it determines the truth conditions
appropriate to the domains to which it can be applied.
• A style of reasoning is more than a group of techniques for
bringing new kinds of fact into our awareness, into our living,
mental, social world. I say that it creates the very criteria of truth.
It is, as I like to say, self-authenticating. P. 4
• …the introduction of new types of objects and new ways to verify
judgments about them is one source of the stability of the
sciences. P.4
2. Razonamiento: verdad y objetos
• Each scientific style of reasoning introduces a new domain of
objects to study. Each style introduces a new class of objects
• Are electrons real, or only instruments for thinking and organizing
phenomena? Are numbers, or the power of the continuum, real,
or only constructions made by human beings? P. 4
• Disputes about the truth of classification precede anything we
now call science. In the Middle Ages the schoolmen debated
realism and nominalism.
– One party said: there really are some classes found in nature…
– another party ….that it is only we who group things into
classes, and that our names do not pick out a real species of
individuals. There is nothing in the world but individual entities.
Classes, groups, genera, are a fiction. P. 5
2. Razonamiento: verdad y objetos
• From at latest the time of Aristotle, the idea of nature has served
as a way to disguise ideology, to appear to be perfectly neutral.
No study of classification can escape the obligation to examine
the roots of this idea.... P. 7
•  With new names, new objects come into being. Not quickly.
Only with usage, only with layer after layer of usage. It is not so
much that we first create the essence of a new object, but its
skin, its surface, that with which we interact: that in which we
superficially intervene. P. 8
•  Naming alone is never enough to create. Naming occurs in sites,
particular places, and at particular times. For a name to begin to
do its creative work, it needs authority.
2. Razonamiento: verdad y objetos
• One needs usage within institutions. Naming does its work
only as a social history works itself out.
• Objects come into being. We have a technical word in
philosophy for the study of being: ‘ontology’. It was
traditionally thought of as a timeless discipline. Nietzsche
speaks of the appearance and disappearance of objects,
not of being in general but of being in particular, being in
time. He speaks, we might say, of a historical ontology. P. 8
• …names work in different ways at different times, because
they have quite different associations.
3. Clasificación: creación de personas
• Hannah Arendt saw the very idea of genius as an invention of
the early German romantics. Julia Kristeva finds the roots of
genius in an earlier era, when an act of God imprinted an
inspired vision into a holy man or woman (Kristeva 1999, 2001).
And for some time now genius has been measured by the high
end of an intelligence test.
• Names do not work alone, as mere sounds and signifiers. They
work in an immense world of practices, institutions, authorities,
connotations, stories, analogies, memories, fantasies. P. 9
•  An analysis of classifications of human beings is an analysis of
classificatory words in the sites in which they are used, of the
relations between speaker and hearer, of external descriptions
and internal sensibilities. P. 9
3. Clasificación: creación de personas
• When we characterize a type of person or behavior, it can
affect some people so classified in a direct way, and may even
change them.
• Systematic and institutionalized social sciences have their
retinues of statistical data and computer analyses that work
with classifications of people.
• It is taken for granted that these classifications work in the
same way as those in the natural sciences. In fact the
classifications in the social sciences aim at moving targets,
namely people and groups of people who may change in part
because they are aware of how they are classified. P. 10
3. Clasificación: creación de personas

• We are especially concerned with classifications

that, when known by people or by those around
them, and put to work in institutions, change the
ways in which individuals experience themselves –
and may even lead people to evolve their feelings
and behaviour in part because they are so
classified. Such classifications (of people and their
behaviour) are interactive. This ugly phrase has the
merit of recalling actors, agency and action. P. 1
3. Clasificación: creación de personas
• There can be strong interactions. What was known about people
classified in a certain way may become false because people so
classified have changed in virtue of how they have been classified,
what they believe about themselves, or because of how they have
been treated as so classified. There is what I call a looping effect
(Hacking 1995). P. 11

• ..how classifications affect us, and how we create classes anew. It

relates to a whole range of disciplines and subdisciplines, from
labeling theory to the cognitive sciences. …there is no received
body of philosophical study of the classifications of people. In
contrast there is a philosophical tradition that deals with the
classification of things found in nature. P. 12