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I was an avid fan of Feyerabend when I came across a curious little article by a certain Ian Hacking in a Feyerabend reader. This particular article was startling in its down-to-earth approach to the philosophy of science. It’s insistent mantra mirrored that of my supervisor’s, “always go back to the experiment”.

That article turned out to be from a pivotal chapter of Representing and Intervening, a lovely little book that I have grown to love. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this book revolutionised the philosophy of science by turning on its head the role of theory and experimentation (experimentation is king whereas I am a lowly theoretical biophysicst!).

The question that dominates the second half of the book, by far the better half, is when does a entity in science become a real entity. The answer, according to Hacking is “if you can spray it then its real.” In one fell swoop, Hacking side-steps thorny and abtruse concepts that have plagued the philosophy of science such as falsification, induction and paradigms. Hacking re-interprets historical episodes and demonstrates how the final acceptance of a theory was its experimental reliability, not just in single instances, but in a diverse range of applications. The power of his examples is that they are drawn from contemporary experiments – something that not many philosophers of science actually do.

As a companion to the book, I really recommend Bruno Latour’s “Laboratory Life”. Latour complements Hacking by showing just exactly how a single scientific entity changes shape as the experimental techniques which intersect it are expanded and improved upon.

Another beautiful quality of the book is the lucid prose. Hacking shows how philosophers don’t need to write in a profound style to convey profound thoughts.
Rating: 5 / 5

Ian Hacking’s books are a model of clear, persuasive writing on difficult topics and this is one of his best books. In this book, he lays bare the central issues in philosophy of science (realism and rationality) in a way that makes them accessible to a non-specialist reader.

Almost unique among scholars, Hacking is equally skilled with history, concepts, and traditions, and uses these skills together well to paint a well organized and compelling picture of science; capturing both its beauty and its warts. He also does an admirable job capturing the various ways we have tried to *explain* science over the years.

This is not the usual simplistically “balanced” presentation of philosophy of science that treats all perspectives as having equal votes. Hacking makes his own moderate realist view on the issues clear at each point while he always appears to me to do justice to other viewpoints. One of the things I find most useful and special about Ian Hacking’s arguments is that he seems to put great effort into successfully finding the real strengths of each viewpoint before evaluating it. He also often finds instructive points of difference between seemingly almost identical viewpoints.

Hacking discusses both realism and rationality, to place them both into perpsective in philosophy of science. We need at least a rudimentary idea of the role reasoning plays in scientific work in order to be able to speak productively about the reality of the things we are talking about. His focus is however consistently on realism: the question of the reality of theories and the question of the reality of entities and substances. This book is not yet another jeremiad on the “logic of science,” or the lack thereof, it is a careful discussion of specifically the *ways* in which things are considered real in science, and the *significance* of treating things as real.

Hacking understands well the complex relationship between theory and experiment, giving us a superbly nuanced but easily understandable summary analysis of important concepts like incommensurability and the “theory boundness” of data. He then applies the results of these analyses back to the larger issues to support his own realist perspective.

The result is a view that strongly emphasizes experimentation. Entities and substances become real in science as they become a practical part of engineering and experimentation, rather than as a result of a verified theory or a long-lived theory.

Hacking is lukewarm about the reality of scientific theories compared to the reality of experimentally useful entities. He says: “Scientific realism about theories has to adopt the Peircean qualities of faith, hope, and charity. Scientific realism about entities needs no such virtues.” This is one example of how Hacking uses the philosophical viewpoints of positivism and pragmatism throughout to illustrate the different ways of thinking about scientific reasoning. It would be hard to find a better, more understandable summary of the ideas of Kuhn or Feyerabend, including the specific ways their ideas have been used (or sometimes misused).

I consider this book a classic overview of the philosophy of science that accurately captures both the history of its ideas and the central conceptual issues that make it interesting and important. Hacking’s lucid, clear prose and relentless attention to detailed real examples (without ever losing the larger picture) make this book both a pleasure to read and a splendid education in the topic.
Rating: 5 / 5

This book, which is among my all-time favorite philosophy books, is a paradigm of how the subject should be introduced. It succeeds in introducing readers to many of the most important issues and ideas in contemporary philosophy of science; it’s informed by a thorough knowledge of the history of both science and philosophy; it advances a unique perspective, one emphasizing the importance of experimentation as opposed to theorizing, on debates about scientific realism; and it is written in a straightforward and engaging style. In other words, this is an excellent book–one that manages to be both entertaining and informative.

As I mentioned above, Hacking’s emphasis here is on experimentation as opposed to theorizing. Naturally, philosophers of science are drawn to the study of scientific theorizing; theorizing is what they do, and it’s what they understand. But Hacking argues that the prospects for scientific realism (i.e. for the view that the sciences are objective and reveal the (approximate) truth about the world) are dim if you focus on theory alone, and he thinks this is something that has been borne out by recent philosophy of science. Rather than focus on theorizing, he claims, we should focus on the ways in which science involves intervention in the world. Through experimentation, scientists can step into the world and manipulate and change it. This is the way that science allows us to discover something about the world around us–not by the relatively passive activity of formulating theories, but by action in the world.

Hacking starts his book by giving a brief overview of how the historicism of Kuhn altered the project in the philosophy of science. He argues that earlier philosophies of science, like Carnap’s positivism and Popper’s falsificationism, had agreed on quite a bit despite their superficial similarities. Kuhn’s work came along and upset all of this consensus. He denied that there was any particular method shared by all the sciences across time, that the sciences involved a cumulative process of knowledge acquisition, that observation could be distinguished from theorizing and understood as an independent source of evidence for and against theories, that the sciences could be understood ahistorically, etc. These views also posed some problems for the objectivity of science. The assumptions Kuhn denied were those undergirding the traditional conception of the objectivity of science, of how scientific inquiry arrived at truths about the world.

But does this mean that an understanding of the history of science should undermine our confidence in the objectivity of science and the accuracy of its results? In some ways, Hacking’s book is an introduction to these worries and the various possible responses to them. For most philosophers, issues concerning the objectivity of science turn on the question of whether we have good reason to believe that our best scientific theories are true (or approximately true) or that we are making gradual progress towards true theories by doing science.

In the first half of the book, Hacking discusses important arguments for and against the view that we have good reason to believe that our best scientific theories are true. Here he is primarily concerned with what he calls realism about theories: the doctrine that scientific theories are true or false, and that we have good reason to believe that many of our best theories are true (or approximately true). Hacking covers a lot of interesting ground in his discussion of the prospects for this sort of realism. He begins by discussing positivist and pragmatist accounts of the nature of science and the reality that science can reveal to us. He then takes up arguments about incommensurability that have been developed by Feyerabend and Kuhn, and that appear to question our understanding of science as progressing towards the truth about the world. This is followed up by a chapter about causal theories of reference and how they might allow us to avoid arguments from meaning incommensurability. Hacking then takes a bit of detour and considers how Putnam was led from his causal theory of reference to a form of anti-realism; this chapter, while perhaps not central to the argument, is an interesting introduction to Putnam’s views around the time of the publication of Reason, Truth, and History. He then discusses Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programmes.

All of this first half of the book is very exciting, and it’s somewhat different from the usual introduction to the philosophy of science. It’s not that Hacking is discussing material different from what you find in introductory texts of this sort; he isn’t. But he is more interested in drawing lessons from the history of philosophy and in appealing to views outside the narrow confines of the philosophy of science. For instance, the chapter on Putnam’s internal realism (and its similarities to Kant’s epistemological views) would be out of place in most introductory philosophy of science tests, but it’s a perfect fit here. This makes this book more interesting to philosophers in general, and it also reflects that fact that individual areas of philosophy aren’t wholly separate from one another. While the philosophy of science does have a distinctive subject matter, it is bound to be influenced by developments and trends in other areas of philosophy.

Anyway, Hacking has serious doubts about the plausibility of realism about theories. This doesn’t mean he doubts the objectivity of science, however. He thinks we should shift our emphasis, when discussing issues of objectivity, from theorizing to experimentation. So he defends realism about entities: the doctrine that scientific experiments involve the observation and manipulation of real entities, and that we have good reason to believe experimentation involves this sort of interaction with the real world. But, he thinks, this doesn’t establish that the theories we have about these entities are correct in all their details. The second half of the book is an extended defense of Hacking’s realism about entities.

The ideal audience for this book is philosophically sophisticated readers who don’t know a great deal about the philosophy of science, though I think much of the book would be useful to anyone interested in the philosophy of science.
Rating: 5 / 5

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