Foucauldian Imprints in the Early Works of Ian Hacking

ABSTRACT

Ian Hacking has defined himself as a philosopher in the analytic tradition. However, he has also recognized the profound influence that Michel Foucault had on much of his work. In this article I analyse the specific imprint of certain works by Foucault—in particular Les mots et les choses—in two of Hacking’s early works: Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? and The Emergence of Probability. I propose that these texts not only share a debt of Foucauldian thought, but also are part of what I believe is Hacking’s central project: the analysis of the historical and situated conditions of possibility for the emergence of concepts and of objects, inspired also by the French philosopher’s thought.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to three referees for International Studies in the Philosophy of Science for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Special thanks are due to the editor, James McAllister.

Notes

1. Madness and Civilization was an abridged edition of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Foucault 1972a).

2. As we will see, situating concepts means considering the sentences in which they appear, and also, to a greater extent, the institution, authority, and so on from which they are expressed.

3. In reference to the expression ‘what is done with the language’, Foucault positively accepts what Austin calls the perlocutionary effect of language as a means for bringing about concerted action.

4. Hacking ([1982] 2002, 161–162) introduced the notion of ‘styles of scientific reasoning’, coined based on the concept of styles of scientific thinking of Alistair C. Crombie (1994). In Scientific Reason, in addition to mentioning several problems with the use of the word ‘style’, Hacking said that he had abandoned the phrase ‘styles of scientific reasoning’ and returned to Crombie's ‘styles of scientific thinking’ (Hacking 2009, 19). One year later, Hacking (2010, 3) maintained that because science was a matter of activity and thought, and because he wanted to emphasize action and intervention, he would utilize ‘styles of scientific thinking & doing’.

5. Given the problems inherent in translating the word ‘evidence’ into other languages, Hacking has made some clarifications about his use of the term. In English, ‘evidence’ means the facts, the data, that are the indicators of other facts, and at times, proof positive of those facts. In the preface to the French edition of L’émergence de la probabilité (Hacking 2002b), Hacking clarified that in chapter 4 of The Emergence of Probability, he used the term in the English sense of factual evidence.