Entre Science Et Réalité: La Construction Sociale De Quoi ?

by Various, Baudouin Jurdant (Translator)

" Je ne veux pas la paix entre le scientifique et le constructionniste. Je voudrais que l'on comprenne mieux comment ils sont en désaccord, et pourquoi ils sont inconciliables. " Tel est l'objectif poursuivi par Ian Hacking dans ce livre, désormais classique, où il procède à un examen minutieux des us et abus de ce maître mot du discours des sciences sociales contemporaines, la " construction sociale ". Construction sociale de quoi ?, demande Hacking : les faits, les catégories de genre, les objets, les quarks, la réalité, les maladies, les diagnostics, la pédophilie ? En dehors d'un usage inspiré par la mode du discours postmoderne, l'expression se trouve au coeur d'un ensemble impressionnant de recherches nouvelles et de travaux originaux sur les cultures, les sciences, les femmes, l'histoire, la nature ou la littérature. Mais si ce concept est incontestablement utile, il a parfois pris l'allure d'un slogan propre à déclencher l'ire agressive de certains scientifiques et philosophes dits " réalistes ", qui voient dans l'idée même que la réalité soit le produit d'une construction sociale une négation relativiste de celle-ci. Écrit avec générosité et humour par l'un des plus éminents philosophes contemporains de la science, ce livre apporte des éclaircissements originaux sur les plus vieilles querelles de la philosophie, sur la nature de la connaissance scientifique et ses rapports au monde dans lequel nous vivons.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Sociology, Psychology, Theory, Academic

300 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Various is the correct author for any book with multiple unknown authors, and is acceptable for books with multiple known authors, especially if not all are known or the list is very long (over 50).

If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.

Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.

Reviews

[Rachel Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to think of Ian Hacking as the "Oliver Sacks" of the philosophy of science. Never boring, and stocked with a seemingly endless supply of interesting facts, details, and stories, Hacking makes reading and thinking about the history of science positively fun (and controversial!). The Social Construction of What? is Hacking's foray into the Science Wars, sometimes called the "Culture Wars". Hacking makes a compelling case that these Wars represent "sticking points" of differing philosophical temperaments with a long and distinguished history e.g. the ancient debate between what Hacking calls nominalists and inherent-structuralists.

Hacking's contributions to these debates involves clearing up a mess of conceptual confusions about what the debate amounts to, what the relevant terms mean, and how to resolve (or dissolve) the tension. Hacking seems to think that the term "social construction" is practically useless given the inevitable ambiguities and myriad meanings associated with the term. Ever ecumenical, Hacking nevertheless argues that both the realists and constructionists have a point worth making, and diagnoses the debates partially as a result of each side talking past each other with an ample dose of pamphleteering. Once a scientific question is well-posed, realists are right to insist there are determinate answers independent of what anyone thinks. But constructionists are right to point out that contingent personal, social, and cultural factors influence what questions are asked, as well as the standards and methods used to evaluate the answers to the questions. Thus, Hacking concludes that although the "content" of science is realist enough to warrant the term, the "form" of science is not.

[Andrew]

I know social construction is supposed to be the great bogeyman of the sciences. But as someone who received a strong science education as well as a strong humanities education, I can't help but appreciate both the arguments for and against social construction, and I also can't help but pound my fists at the way the two sides of the debate can't seem to understand each other.

Ian Hacking maintains roughly the same position as me-- that the sciences and the social constructionists act as gadflies for each other, with each side of the debate contributing something valuable in the general intellectual discourse. And he provides plenty of amusing anecdotes along the way. While there isn't much of a case put forth, he certainly does a good job of elaborating how social construction works.

[Garnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hacking is remarkable for taking very seriously, with fascinating examples, a topic that many scientists would blow off.
He distills much of the social construction literature to three simply put, but not so simple, questions about the nature of scientific facts:
What is the role of nominalism?
----->(To what extent are scientific facts a consequence of vocabulary, language, and naming conventions?)
What is the role of historical contingency?
----->(Would scientific facts be different if history had played out differently?
What is the role stability?
----->(Are scientific theories stable because they are close to true? or because social/political pressures?)

Despite what my grad school buddies think, there is no empirical answer to these questions, but they can't be ignored.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Balanced analysis of this usually partisan matter. Hacking is the first scientific constructionist to not irritate me. He concludes that, at least in science, social construction happens and can't just be dismissed by appeal to the Context of Justification. This is more plausible because (where, with e.g. Bruno Latour it isn't clear) he has clearly properly studied the science he covers.

The section where he tries to navigate the trade-off between realism's history of oppression, and relativism's potential for totalitarian abuse is touching. (He concludes that he just is "of the wrong generation" to get behind radical constructionisms!)

The first section - just a huge long disambiguation of all the different things people mean when they say something is socially constructed - is 5/5 please read it. Required reading for anyone who wants to use, or dismiss, the concept.

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 3 out of 5]

The problem with being a Rorty-ian pragmatist is that debate with so called "realists" is impossible because social constructionism is our starting point, and we only account for various levels of contingency (i.e. communities of agreement) after that. This is not to say that "real" things do not exist, only that any meaning we can attach to them is necessarily social. Thus, neither a "table" nor a "woman" exists with a true essence of "tableness" or "womanhood". Rather, while physical objects exist in the world, the status of a table, for example, only exists because we contingently agree that it does: the flat surface we now call "table" may well serve as a bed or a chair or a footstool. It's all a language game to pragmatists, which is why the epistemic question underlying the debate between social constructivism and essentialism - "what is this?" - is a useless one to us.

Realists, on the other hand, start from a place where a true nature of things exists, and social constructivist forces come up to obscure this true nature or superimpose upon it, but never actually eradicate or overcome the truth of it. So while many of our ideas about gender (a la Butler) or madness (a la Foucault) - all stemming from late Wittgenstein's socio-linguistic turn - may influence the debate, they do not change the fact that there is an ontological category of sex - what it is to be a (human) being of a particular biological sexual kind, or of madness,- that exists outside of the social constructivist power of language, and that, even if it cannot be apprehended by us, is nonetheless true.

Hacking takes these debates between the purported "objectivists" and "relativists" and produces some unique insights. I especially enjoyed the parts on clinical classification. Nevertheless, I think the debate is a tired one, and his writing is all over the place. While individual insights in the book might make one pause and reflect, the book does not resolve or move forward the debate itself in either direction.

[Nick Geiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book as a skeptic about social construction. Hacking offers a clear and thorough treatment of social construction that disabused me of most of my concerns. One example of his style is to step back and ask what the /point/ of social construction-type critique is. For example, no one disputes this proposition: "The English language is a social construct." But people do raise eyebrows when critics ask about the social construction of the family, or mental illness, or immigrants. The point of social construction is normally to help us step back from beliefs about practices or institutions that we take for granted and to view them in a new and helpful light. Similarly, Hacking observes that the object of social construction aren't things, but /kinds/--how we classify objects in the world. When we say "X is a social construct", we don't mean that the object X denotes isn't a real object in the world or just in our heads. We mean that the /kind/ associated with X is a social construct. The recent re-categorization/"demotion" of Pluto to a dwarf planet is a good example. Hacking gives useful context to the radical use of social construction by comparing it to constructivism in ethics, mathematics, and early analytic philosophy.

Most of the later chapters in the book are devoted to case studies of topics in the social construction literature such as mental illness, child abuse, and my favorite example, missile accuracy--an area study literally made up by defense contractors in the 1950s. This is an illuminating book on subject the discussion of which tends unnecessarily to raise the temperature of the room.

[Abhinav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophy study group read

A book that has something for everyone on each side of the fraught topic of social construction, is a marvellous book indeed.

I came in sympathetic. Over time, my wading through the murky waters of philosophy has strengthened my appreciation for the constructivist lens, and weakened naive trust in scientific facts. I also came in confident - and was disabused quickly - that I knew this sphere of thinking fairly well. Feminist ideas have been hugely influential, and they are almost always constructivist about gender. Race is another heavyweight in this arena.

What Hacking has done is make me realise the breadth and depth of thinking in constructivism. He does so without touching on gender and race at all. A deliberate choice - he hopes that using examples that aren’t quite that important to people - might douse the passions and let the philosophising shine. Oh he succeeds, and I find that he brings out another kind of passion. A deep-seated desire to bring clarity to complexity, and a hope that the clarity helps conversation.

One way he achieves this is by trying to get at the heart of what the “sides” are really about. Why must there be sides? Where a constructivist explanation is true, it must be. Where a scientific explanation is true, it must be. The framing already betrays the terms of the debate. How can truth be outside of the realm of science?

So constructivist explanations must be fantasy. Or charitably - literature. Hacking infuses this dichotomy with nuance and dissolves it.

That Hacking does is a tribute to his impartiality because he professes early on that he stands firmly in the camp of “reason”. He’s the man looking in from the house of science at the strange neighbour in the window. What on earth are those social constructionists up to? What the heck do they even mean? In the early chapters, this “othering” lens seems fairly obvious - the incredible nitpicking about the construction metaphor, and how it was not always clear in which sense it was being used, seemed overdone.

But with his binoculars operating at full power, he arrives at something profound: that one must not ask what social constructivism is, but what it’s trying to do.

Constructivist explanations don’t always aim at truth, even if truth empowers their effect. They aim at belief. They hope to weaken by unmasking unwarranted assumptions. They hope to bust reverence, and bring back a clear-eyed appreciation for contingency. In doing so, one could argue that they’re strengthening science. They’re insisting that the bar to be cleared for contingency to be promoted into timeless truth be very, very high.

As always, clean dichotomies never truly hold when they’re squinted at. Unmasking is also what science often does. I, long irreligious, drew pleasure - and conviction - from the ability of scientific explanations to unpick the mystique of religion. They might say that they’re only showing the truth, and the loss of conviction is entirely the choice of the truth-absorber. But constructivists would turn that right back, and say - we’re only showing the historical facts of how a remarkably unlikely set of contingent events led to us believing in a particular scientific fact. If that leads you to not believe in it any more, so be it, so be it.

Therein lies, I believe, an aspect of this debate that is crucial. This is a jostle for cultural force. In post-religious Western societies, a belief deemed scientific is powerful. A scientific explanation demands belief, and it does this by framing itself as the ultimate explanation. Now, an evopsych scientist may offer a scientific explanation that “women do better in the kitchen because their fingers evolved in the prehistoric environment to grip vegetables (?!)”. A feminist constructivist might respond that “white male scientists say this because they’re parroting hegemonic ideas. They’re rooting a changeable social phenomenon in timeless biology.” The scientist might respond back that “the feminists say that because they’re ideologically driven and unable to see reality.” And so on.

That has the flavour of a youtube argument to it, but there’s a force to being the arbiter of the ultimate explanation that cannot be denied. Hacking shows us why and how the debate has deep roots. He finds the best defenders of each position and accepts their sincerity. By doing so, he elevates the debate. He takes their arguments seriously, and finds often that the disagreements may be irreconcilable because they draw from two traditions of seeing reality that have deep, deep philosophical roots: nominalism and realism.

Oh no, that’s metaphysics. Hacking makes the case that the heart of the debate is indeed metaphysical, and he makes a darned good case. Nominalism is sceptical that there are facts out there waiting to be discovered like realism claims to be doing. Instead, when we discover facts, what we’re doing is making an interpretation of the universe - a model, an approximation if you will - that can be very, very useful, but not a discovery in the usual sense of the word. In domains like mental illness, this position is easier to defend. You’re cutting up the infinite variety of human suffering into neatly labelled boxes. The boxes aren’t out there in the universe being discovered; instead they’re being created - and hopefully discarded - depending on their usefulness.

But physics? I’ve learnt that there are sincere and thoughtful philosophers who argue for the social construction of quarks. (I’m itching to read some of their work.) Hacking summons example after example, and with each one, the book becomes even more interesting. What did the natives who murdered Captain Cook truly believe? What is the problem with the theory of rocks (well - dolomite)?

Hacking’s study of child abuse is perhaps my favourite. It’s rigorous, thoughtful, but also sensitive and passionate. It also is an example of why this debate matters. There is an immediacy to this debate that goes beyond leisurely intellectualising. Clearly, a lot of people feel this way, and that’s why we have the vitriol in culture wars. But what causes that immediacy?

Hacking offers a valuable conceptual model to help. Natural kinds are things like quarks and planets. Interactive kinds are people - like you or I. The point of this distinction is that natural kinds do not care that they’re labelled a particular way. Pluto’s destiny did not change in any direct way because it stopped being called a planet. Interactive kinds are people, and people react to the labelling done to them. The label of autism - to take an example - exists in a social context with associated opportunities, expectations from people, range of identities and so on. To be labelled autistic is to surely completely, utterly change the course of a person’s destiny. That is, indeed, often the hope - that such a transformation would be beneficial. But to insist that the label is mere discovery of “facts out there”, is to ignore an essential distinction when it comes to self-aware beings.

And that is where the immediacy comes from, I think. The irreverence of social constructivism hopes to pin the harms - and not just the benefits - on the theorists doing dispassionate labelling. Because when the debate becomes about a tiny thing like the course of human history, it cannot but be immediate.

[Tùng Đỗ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book that clarifies some common misconceptions about social construction-ism, although the case studies about scientific findings are a bit dry. Despite never stating (directly?) what a social construct means, from Hacking's analysis, my conjecture is that a thing is only a social construct insofar as it:
1. it would not have existed without some degree of social consensus, which means it is ONTOLOGICALLY SUBJECTIVE, but this doesn't mean that a social construct cannot be epistemologically objective (money, for example, is something very real and objective, albeit being a social construct)
2. Its existence is contingent, i.e. it isn't inevitable or necessary.

Ian Hacking basically argues that it isn't unreasonable to think of many concepts today as social constructs (quarks, gender, child abuse, mental illnesses, etc). Again, this doesn't mean that child abuse is not real or never happened. It is true that there are cases of child abuse, but the concept of child abuse and the institutional practices associated with it only came along at a certain time in history, and such categorization is arbitrary and contingent. So child abuse, as an "object", exists independently of whether we conceptualize it; nevertheless, the concept/idea of child abuse only became a social reality recently.

Ian Hacking also investigates the way these categorizations impact the individuals who are framed within them, and how they, in return, reshaped such categories.

That's a short synopsis of what Ian Hacking does in this book. There is not much theory (which is something I personally would like more), but some interesting case studies in social sciences and natural sciences. I'd recommend anyone who has beef with the idea of social construction-ism to read it; it might change your opinions, or at least encourage you to develop a more charitable and sympathetic attitude toward social constructionists.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hacking must have ADD. Reading this book is like having a conversation with a person who continually changes the subject, though as if the discussion were linear and logical. That is not to say that Hacking draws numerous conclusions from obviously faulty reasoning. Rather, beyond the first few chapters, it is difficult to tell what Hacking's point is. While his stories and analysis are interesting and fun, many of the later chapters do not connect very well (or are just not connected well) with the points of the earlier chapters.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't mean to disappoint you, but this book is not actually about the word "what." But you still might want to read it if you've ever wondered whether the concept of "child abuse" makes any sense.

[Hobart Mariner · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Guy tries to get something coherent out of the science wars of the 90s and kind of succeeds, but mostly the value of the book lies in his historical examples.

Enjoyed his hierarchy of different kinds of social construction...reminded me of the New Inquiry-style leftist worksheet that people were copy-pasting a while back.

Really enjoy the digressions on missile accuracy, bubble chambers, and Captain Cook, although the latter (which forms the last chapter) doesn't fit much with the rest of the book. There's something appealing in Hacking, he lets himself be persuaded, whether fully or partially, by people whose rhetoric and initial premises he clearly is annoyed to death by. His view of social constructionist (he splits too many hairs between constructionist/alist/ivist) stuff boils down to: contingency, nominalism, external sources of stability/cui bono. Looking at the periodic debates now I think that only the cui bono / ad hominem criticisms of science have survived -- nobody cares about contingency or whether nature comes pre-carved at the joints.

He chooses strange topics: child abuse, rocks, military research, but they all shed light. The rocks chapter is great history of geology although I don't think it fit into his scheme well.

Good INTJ mind-bath

[Em]

Pretty poorly organised (not particularly surprising and not a huge flaw) but overall an interesting look at social construction.

First three chapters or so are good analyses of what we're really talking about when we talk about it and why we should be concerned with getting to grips with the language and concepts properly. The "sticking points" he identifies are interesting, I've got a feeling that the most interesting to look into a little more would be contingency because I feel like it could get technical in some really interesting ways.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Name one book Pauly B. hasn't read (in favor of others, among them Hegel, I suppose)

[danielle tseng]

so i read just chapter 4 per my advisor’s recommendation, but im marking it because it required the labor of reading an entire book. also i need to reread it lolol

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Social Construction is a specter haunting research. Or at least it is one of the focal points of the Science Wars, between figures arguing the objectivity and integrity of science (usually particle physicists) and those arguing the opposite (usually sociologists or historians or anthropologists or some such). Certainly, Hacking was able to find 25 books of the form 'the Social Construction of X", (one for every letter of the alphabet, bar X), but what is socially construction and why does it matter?

As a philosopher of science, Hacking has a broader view than many of us in the trenches. His discussion of major arguments by Latour, Pickering, Kuhn, Lakatos, Quine, and Popper, to name a few of the protagonists is clear and enjoyable. This is a first rate literature review! I think that Hacking is on to something when he points out that this argument is in fact very old, stretching back to Aristotle and Plato, and more commonly invoked in arguments between Nominalists and Realists. The arguments over whether names and categories are arbitrary and human-imposed, or whether they parallel some deeper structure of the universe, are long-standing and likely unresolvable.

Hackings's major contributions in the book are an analysis of the whys and hows of Social Construction. He identifies a six point scale of construction, from least to most radical: historical, ironic, reformist, unmasking, rebellious, and revolutionary. Social construction tends towards radical formulations because it argues against the inevitability of what is, and that the world as we understand it would be better (more just, less oppressive, more joyful) if we rearranged society. A second part are criterion for judging how constructivist an argument is on scales of contingency--could it have developed differently, nominalism, and the importance of internal or external explanations for the stability of a fact.

Unfortunately, Hacking's own work, when it departs from a review of the literature, is far less compelling. He develops a theory of interactive and indifferent kinds. Interactive kinds are exemplified by mental disorders, and their presence in the world changes in accord with our knowledge of the kind. Indifference kinds are like fundamental particles, and do not care what we know of them. Kinds are probably the least rigorous categorizing schema imaginable, nothing more than "things that are alike, somehow." It is no mere linguistic coincidence that the psuedoscience of Genesis-inspired species is called Baraminology, the study of created kinds. Interactive kinds are trivially socially constructed; Hacking is less vocal on the social construction of the scientific objects of indifferent kinds. I'd judge "kinds" to be too floppy of a concept to do philosophy with.

The four case studies, on mental illness, child abuse, weapons, dolomite, and Captain Cook's death, are recycled from other work and not particularly well suited to philosophic theories in Chapters 1 & 3.

One big question, that is not adequately answered, is 'is social construction a worthwhile approach.' Hacking makes a compelling case that some of the leading theorists classified as 'social constructionists', such as Latour and Bloor, are no such thing. Social constructionist research is mostly based on shoddy readings of theories which say no such things, and therefore should be avoided as bad work. However, by linking things, the idea of things, and the social and material matrix in which the thing and its ideas are embedded, social construction opens an immense scope of potential questions and common conversations for scholars. As a research program (in Lakatos's terminology), social construction has been immensely successful. We should know how to use it more precisely.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd describe myself as "at-risk" of being a naïve STEMbot sometimes, so over the last few years I've been on the lookout for good mid-level introductions to topics in the "softer" sciences and the humanities. And social construction is a topic that has caused me an awful lot of trouble. I was introduced to the idea of "The Social Construction of Reality" in a freshman-level sociology class, and had an immediate visceral reaction to it. Surely the natural sciences couldn't be said to be constructed in any meaningful way? Surely some things simply are, regardless of what we think about them, and these things can be discovered, despite the trivially obvious fact that science is a social process? I honestly don't remember the exact way the class formulated the idea of social construction, and I wasn't in a sufficiently intellectually honest place to give it a fair shake. Despite that, constructionist thought really hadn't clicked with me in any real way, even when I was more receptive to its arguments.

This book cleared up so many of my misconceptions. Hacking does a masterful job of diving into the diverse realm of constructionist arguments, while also identifying clusters of arguments that are sometimes called "constructionist" but appear mainly to be called "constructionist" only to cash in on a trend. From the actual constructionist arguments, he isolated some stable reference points of things that can be said to be constructed: contingency, nominalism, and stability. In other words, there is some historical precedent that caused us to think about subject X, X is not part of the inherent structure of reality, and X is a stable idea within a culture. Also, at least for humans, there is a cultural feedback effect associated with being classified in a certain way. For example, in the first chapter Hacking talks about the social construction of "women refugees". This is a concept that is created, but then the people now classified as "women refugees" react to their new classification in different ways, and the concept is reinforced or challenged based on this feedback.

This is not to say that Hacking comes down squarely on the side of constructionism, though he's not exactly an "essentialist" either (also, he prefers the term "inherent-structurist"). This was written in the heyday of the "Science Wars" of the '90s, and Hacking is mainly trying to wend a path between the (natural) scientists and the sociologists and philosophers, since he reads a lot of the shouting as people who fundamentally don't know how to communicate with each other outside of their domain-specific languages (a view I'm finding more and more correct myself). So most of the book is an attempt to bridge the gap, Hacking taking an example of something that could be considered socially constructed (the natural sciences, rocks, child abuse, madness, the apotheosis of Captain Cook) and tries to find a straightforward explication of the conversation around them, finally giving a score based on his own views of the matter.

In short, I came away from the book thinking "Social construction is not bullshit, it's not the only answer, these questions are harder than you think, and we could use some better interdisciplinary analysis." So, if you could stand to have your horizons broadened a little, check this book out.

[path · Rating 3 out of 5]

For as much as "social construction" appears to be a term of art, it is often used in imprecise and slippery ways. Typically, "social construction" is used to describe how phenomena around us are real in the sense and to the degree that they are mutually-held social phenomena (e.g., justice, art). But the term is also used, more problematically (for some), to describe phenomena that are simply built up socially (i.e., literally constructed) through beliefs, documents, technologies, and institutions. And this broader definition implicates an equally broader range of phenomena under the title of "social construction," such as property, national identities, scientific facts, mental illness, etc. As Hacking points out, these are all very different "what's," and what is meant by saying they are "socially constructed" is quite different. As the term is used by scholars, "socially constructed" means that the object is contingent on human observation/interaction, or sometimes it means that the thing exists only because it is named and thereby distinguished from the background of stuff around it. Likewise, the methodology of doing "social construction" is equally muddled: it is at times retrospective and at times forward-looking and action-oriented. This book is Hacking's attempt to find some commonalities across these uses of "social construction," in order to have a stable sense of the "what's" to which the phrase is attached. The various "how's" are the subject of other books, which Hacking does address. Overall, this book is good. I found chapters 1-3 to be the most useful for laying out the central argument. Chapter 5 was the clearest case study (on child abuse) through which to present his argument.

This is the first book by Hacking that I have read, so I have nothing to compare it with, but I found the tone to be oddly snarky in a way that I did not like. The arguments are sound, but the argumentation comes across as, at times, dismissive and I think I would say paternalistic in that Hacking (a senior scholar) is talking to his largely younger contemporaries.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some people say that the culture wars have temporarily destroyed the possibility of friendly discussion and scholarly collaboration. What do I think about that? I have always wanted to use in print a word I learned from long ago comic strips, so now I can. Pshaw! [px]

Constructionists state that various items from the sciences are social constructs. Many scientists deny that. They will admit that there is a social history of the discovery of the item in question, say the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Once upon a time, the Second Law had ideological, political or religious overtones. That does not matter. “The Second Law of Thermodynamics is neither an empirical idea, nor a social construction, nor a consensus by institutionalized experience, but an inexorable law based on the molecular constitution of matter.” (Perutz 1996, 69) It is a fact about the universe that we have discovered. The history of its discovery makes no jot of a difference to what it is, was, and always will be. [38]

Construal, construction-as-process, and construction-as-product are inevitably intertwined, but to fail to distinguish them is to fall victim to forgotten etymologies. [39]

…the metaphor of construction has served to express many different kinds of radical philosophical theory, not all of them dedicated to reason. But all agree with Kant in one respect. Construction brings with it one or another critical idea, be it the criticism of the Critique of Pure Reason or the cultural criticisms advanced by constructionists of various stripes. We have logical construction, construction in mathematics, and, following Kant, numerous strains of constructionism in ethical theory, including those of John Rawls and Michel Foucault. [41]

“Wherever possible,” wrote Russell, “logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities… Platonists suppose the numbers exist. Russell urged ontological caution… We know a good deal that we express in terms of numbers and electrons. Russell wanted to be able to state what we do know, without assuming the existence of such things. That is where the notion of a logical construction comes in. On the surface, we appear to be talking about things of a certain kind, but when we analyze more deeply, we are not. [41]

Hence by constructionism [or social constructionism…] I shall mean various sociological, historical, and philosophical projects that aim at displaying or analysing actual, historically situated, social interactions or causal routes that led to, or were involved in, the coming into being or establishing of some present entity or fact. [48]

All construction-isms dwell in the dichotomy between appearance and reality set up by Plato and given a definitive form by Kant. Although social constructionists bask in the sun they call postmodernism, they are really very old-fashioned. [49]

The standard view is of science as discovery of facts that exist “in the world.” The world comes structured into facts. That is not a scientific hypothesis. It is a metaphysical picture. Fleck had a different metaphysical picture. He wrote of the emergence and development of scientific facts… He meant that the world did not come with a prepackaged structure. If we want an old name for this metaphysical picture, it is nominalism. [60]

Since neither scientists nor constructionists dare to use the word metaphysics, it is not surprising that they talk past each other, since each is standing on metaphysical ground in opposition to the other. Talk of metaphysics will seem to many a highbrow evasion of the issues current in the science wars. On the contrary, it is a central part of the story, and ignorance of it brings confusion. But it is only part. [61]

Theories of truth and theories of knowledge produce endless books. From the early nineteenth century until the 1930s, epistemology was king. More recently, theories of truth have ruled the roost. It would be feckless to address such might topics here, for one is not going to make any quick progress. [80]

“Realism” once named the opposite of nominalism but the word now means a lot of things, even in technical philosophy…. nobody nowadays uses “realism” as the opposite of nominalism. [83]
Leibnitz thinks that the reasons underlying truths are internal to those truths, while Locke holds that (our confidence in) truths about the world is always external, never grounded in more than our experience. [91]

Science has found out, by and large, how things are (we are told), how they must be, in the present state of things. .. Constructionists urge that this ideology has an extra-theoretical function: ensuring the cultural authority of science… Thus what is to be unmasked is both a vision of underlying reality revealed by physics and the associated claims to profundity of the entire endeavour. Here we have an acrimonious contretemps… Constructionists want to unmask metaphysics as a bolster for the authority of the sciences. They also want to show that the present state of science was not the only inevitable upshot of dedicated enquiry into the material world that surrounds us. We achieve a robust fit between theories and apparatus, but the fit that we achieve is not the only one we might have arrived at… And finally, the survival of Maxwell’s Equations is not to be explained only by factors internal to electromagnetism, quantum electrodynamics and cosmology. [94, 95]

Most people would guess that the flamboyant anarchist, Paul Feyerabend, was more of a constructionist than that sombre revolutionary, Thomas Kuhn. I find the opposite. We now have a checklist to see how constructionist each author is. #1 Contingency, #2 nominalism, #3 stability. [96]

My question here is not whether the statement is true but – what is the purpose of making the statement? [126]

The boundaries of knowledge lie between the possible and the unthinkable, between sense and nonsense. [167] That old nag of a philosophical distinction, form and content, still has some life in it … A form of knowledge represents what is held to be thinkable, to be possible, at some point in time. [170] … at any time there are classes of possible questions bearing on some subject matter, and that range of possibilities changes for all sorts of reasons… One of the reasons that the unity of science is an idle pipedream is that the forms of different bits of knowledge are brought into being by unrelated and unrelatable chains of events. ]173] …content is what we can see, and form is what we cannot, but which determines the possibilities of what we can see… [185]

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

In their 1994 book Higher Superstition, a sortie against postmodernists and social scientists who question the objective reality of scientific facts, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt asserted that “the left hates science” and sparked the ‘Science Wars’ of the nineties. Scientific realists were pitted against social constructivists, and Alan Sokal sought to highlight a lack of academic rigour in postmodern cultural studies with his hoax article on quantum gravity, published in Social Text. A debate raged between those who saw the results of scientific inquiry as objective truths, facts which would hold regardless of who discovered them, be they white middle-aged men or blue-haired lesbians, and those who wanted to stress that our access to reality is mediated by so many factors that we should avoid talk of objectivity. It is against this backdrop that Ian Hacking wrote his eminently readable Social Construction of What? (2000) in which he examines ‘social construction’ discourse and attempts to strike a happy medium between the opposing sides in the debate. He is sympathetic to the scientists but acknowledges the role constructionism can play in upending certain “truths” which we take for granted.

Hacking begins by laying out the various ways in which social construction talk has been deployed, and finds some uses more valuable than others. Claiming that everything is socially constructed (universal constructionism) renders social construction rather uninteresting, but when applied to race and gender it can productively undermine the status quo, highlighting how these ideas are not inevitable or natural, and potentially could be changed for the better. Hacking examines how social constructionism has been deployed in relation to quarks, women refugees, the child viewer of television and various other topics. He identifies six ‘grades of commitment’ to social construction, from the least demanding to the most demanding:

Historical
Ironic
Reformist/Unmasking
Rebellious
Revolutionary

The historical grade differs little from history; it simply claims that a certain state of affairs was historically contingent. The ironic attitude reminds us that something could have been otherwise, but doesn’t advocate for changing the status quo. The unmaskers and reformers believe that the social construct they’re discussing is bad, while the rebels think we’d be better off without said social construct. Revolutionaries are those who go beyond theory into practice, actively trying to replace the social construct under discussion with something superior.

Hacking examines various social construction claims to ascertain what is said to be socially constructed (an object? An idea? Something more intangible like truth/facts/reality?) and what purpose is served by making this claim.

Hacking sees arguments around social construction in the natural sciences as important, but doesn’t think that social construction language is the best way of approaching the concerns of those who “rage against reason-masquerading-as-innocence” (p.63). For one thing, adopting trendy social construction talk obscures the fact that the debates aren’t new to the 1990s, but go to back to antiquity, and the label ‘constructionist’ has been applied so indiscriminately to anyone involved in Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Science or the Edinburgh ‘Strong Programme’ that it’s not always evident which ideas are being attacked. He steers clear of talk of ‘objectivity’, ‘relativism’ and ‘reality’, focusing instead on three ‘sticking points’ in debates between realists and constructivists: contingency, nominalism and stability in the sciences.

Let’s take the first sticking point discussed, contingency, as an example. In his book Constructing Quarks, Andrew Pickering is not suggesting that quarks themselves, the building blocks of the universe, are socially constructed, though neither is he engaging with the question of whether the idea of quarks is a construct, as it clearly is the result of a historical and social process, making this a trivial claim. Instead, his aim is to show that the emergence of the idea of the quark was never inevitable. Prequark physics was transformed in the 70s with the development of new particle detectors, but it’s not impossible that the “old” methods of physics couldn’t also have borne fruit – “an equally successful but nonquarky fundamental physics” is also possible, according to Pickering. Scientists might think this claim is preposterous, positing a neutral standard of scientific ‘success’ which the nonquarky physics would not match up to.

Hacking finds this a more productive basis on which to have this debate than one centred on whether or not science is accessing objective truth. Shifting the focus from construction to contingency means looking at how scientific success is measured, “the process of resistance and accommodation” (p.73) which Pickering identifies as eventually leading to a “robust fit between the apparatus, beliefs about the apparatus, interpretations and analyses of data, and theories”.

In the following chapters, Hacking turns to consider the social construction of madness, child abuse and dolomite, with chapters also focussing on the influence played by weapons research on the development of non-military technologies and a dispute over whether Hawaiians worshiped Captain Cook as a god. In his chapter on child abuse, Hacking attempts to show that, though socially constructed, ‘kinds’ such as child abuse, abuser and abused child can still be considered ‘scientific’, even if they are not natural kinds. It is scientific in the sense that the kind ‘child abuse’ “claims to discover objective truth about the world and its inhabitants, […] claims to give explanations, to make falsifiable conjectures, to increase our power to predict, control, and improve” (p.130). This thrust towards objectivity resulted in many innocent parents being separated from their children in the ‘Cleveland affair’ in Leeds in the 1980s. The upshot of this example for Hacking is that “the basic trouble with some classifications of people is that objective identification of instances of the kind of person in question misses what is important about the kind, and deludes us into thinking that a straight and simple road is to hand” (p.151). Overzealous paediatricians lost sight of the bigger picture in applying what they considered an ‘objective’ definition of abuse. The same insight is relevant in the case of overdiagnosis of personality disorders and mental conditions.

Hacking eases the reader in gently to what could otherwise be difficult material and avoids lapsing into unexplained jargon. The book provides an accessible introduction to debates in the philosophy of science –some of the details in the chapter on dolomite went over my head, but the general point illustrated by the history of the discovery of dolomite is clear enough. It could have benefitted from an epilogue taking stock of the issues discussed instead of ending abruptly with the chapter on Captain Cook, but otherwise this was a pleasingly limpid text and a delight to read.

[David Jinkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before the woke movement, safe spaces, #metoo, black lives matter, and before Haidt was worried about minds being coddled, there was another moral panic in American education. In the 1990’s, the battle in the universities was over political correctness, cultural relativism, and post-modernism. Some of the more recent debate is a relabeling of the issues from the 1990’s. The recent epithet post-truth, for example, is closely related to central concepts in post-modernism. Other parts of the old debate have fallen out of the discourse. The science wars, for example, are pretty much over, and science has won. In public debates these days, evidence and scientific evidence are nearly synonyms. During the recent Covid pandemic, all across the United States one could see yard signs declaring that the property owners believes in science.

Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? was written in 1999, just a couple of years before American political debate was dominated by 9-11 and the wars that followed. The first chapters of the books are, true to the title, about social construction, but the rest of the book is comprised of a collection of essays written for various audiences at various times in Hacking’s career. This makes the book uneven. The best chapters are the first two on social construction, the following chapter on the natural sciences, and the chapter showing how child abuse came to be. The worst chapter is on weapons research. It is a reprint of a journal article, full of stilted academic language and obscure philosophical references. The last chapter, on whether Captain Cook was really considered a god by Hawaiian natives, is entertaining reading, but doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the book.

In the first chapter, Hacking parses what people mean when they say that something is a social construct. To fix ideas, use a foul ball in baseball as an uncontroversial example. There is no foul ball in nature. The concept was made up – constructed – as part of a game. Hacking points out that everyone who calls something a social construct means that it is contingent. If history had gone a different way, baseball might have been designed with other rules. When we call a foul ball a social construct, this is all we mean.

There is usually more meant, however, by calling something a social construct. A social construct is not just contingent, but also bad or unfortunate. Usually calling something a social construct implies that we should not accept it, maybe even that we should rebel against it. Examples with these further normative shades would include the nuclear family, race, and gender.

Hacking writes about how important social constructs can be for a person’s identity. Suppose someone is put into a category, say that they are tentatively diagnosed with ADHD. This diagnosis become part of their identity, and they may exhibit other behaviors associated with ADHD. The classification "someone with ADHD" becomes self-reinforcing. Hacking calls this phenomenon "looping". Since only people can loop, he argues that the concept of social construct is especially important in the social sciences. A foul ball doesn’t change its behavior simply because we call it foul.

My favorite chapter was on the natural sciences and the science wars. In broad strokes, the science wars were a debate over the authority and reliability of science. On one side were sociologists and historians of science, who believe that science describes disparate methodologies, and that scientific knowledge is not more reliable than other ways of knowing. On the other side were scientists who felt that science had proved itself to be the best way of learning the way reality works.

Hacking masterfully gives each side its due, and shows that the disagreement between the two sides is fundamentally based on philosophy. He writes that there are three philosophical sticking points which prevent the two sides of the science wars from agreeing. The first is whether science is historically contingent. If history would have played out differently, would people have still learned that light travels at 180,000 miles per second? Put another way, if we were to wipe out all scientific knowledge, would people eventually end up writing exactly the same textbooks?

The second sticking point is whether there are natural kinds. Is there naturally one kind of stone called dolomite and another called limestone, or did that classification come into being due to the fact that dolomite often contains oil, while surrounding limestone boxes it in? Would geologists with different priorities have simply called it all by a single name? Does science cleave nature at the joints, or do classifications depend on what is useful for the society doing the classifying?

The third sticking point is in explanation of why scientific knowledge is stable. Textbooks in most subjects today look about the same as they did fifty years ago. The defenders of science say that stability is due to correspondence to reality. Scientific laws are stable because the laws of the universe are stable. The attackers of scientific authority argue that the stability of science has nothing to do with its content, but rather the powerful expert networks that distribute funding and edit prestigious publications. These experts have strong beliefs about the way the world works, and quash views with which they disagree.

At the end of the chapter, Hacking asks the reader to rate themselves on a scale of one to five for each of the sticking points, and Hacking gives both his own rating and what he believes other philosophers of science would have chosen. Having made the effort of giving each side of the science wars a fair hearing, Hacking is in the middle on each of the sticking points. Even though a reader wouldn’t miss much by skipping a couple of the later chapters, this is a thought-provoking book. On the goodreads one to five scale, I’m giving it a five.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An opinionated though balanced treatment of the subject. Some readers will find Hacking's voice charmingly chatty; to others it will be obtrusive. Recommended for those who love a deep dive into historical particulars (e.g. the politics of child abuse, the discovery of dolomite). I skimmed that stuff, since detailed case studies bore me. I prefer a more general and abstract philosophical treatment, and Hacking is helpful there although not usually systematic.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book... it is rich enough and dense enough to keep you coming back for more. The topics are neatly divided so as to drive home the books primary "sticking" points in a variety of contexts. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys philosophy and linguistics.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hacking just passed away recently, a little less than two weeks ago. I know many in my field who were very fond of him. My own advisor is mentioned in the acknowledgements of this book in a characteristically gracious sentence of appreciation and thanks. I first encountered Hacking when reading John Caputo (back in my ‘radical theology’ era, and in hindsight a book about ‘social construction’ would also be the sort of thing some ‘radical theologians’ would find interesting), and I had marked a number of Hacking’s books to read at the time. But I never did read a full book of his until now. I read excerpts from Rewriting the Soul when reading Atwood’s Alias Grace, because I speculated Atwood was either in conversation with Hacking or somehow shared a common forum with him in some way because of the significant overlap in themes. Hacking says it was when he was asked to give some lectures at UBC (which became Chapters 1,2, and 4 in this book) when the person who requested this of him also told him that his book “Rewriting the Soul” was a “classic of social constructionism” — a comment that startled him.

I actually found this book very illuminating as an STS student. I have no means to evaluate its philosophical value, because I’ve read relatively little philosophy and know little about its contours of contestation. I think my own discipline of STS suffers from unnecessary ambiguity and obscurantism sometimes, and I appreciate someone who’s willing to take the time to clarify a field where people are constantly talking past each other.

Hacking sees ‘social constructionism’ emerging as a project that was intended for liberation, but which simultaneously had the potential to cause social damage as well. And he thinks more important than asking for a definition of ‘social construction’ is asking what is the point (though asking ‘what its meaning is’ versus ‘why it is meaningful’ are not completely unrelated questions). This is not unlike Foucault’s emphasis on the function of discourse than its purported meaning.

The first issue of ‘social construction’ Hacking identifies is inevitability. He writes:

“Social constructionists about X tend to hold that:
(1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable.
Very often they go further, and urge that:
(2)  X is quite bad as it is.
(3)  We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed.”
The classic example Hacking first offers is gender, and he offers a slightly complicated example of the term ‘women refugee’ being a ‘social construction’:

“We all think that the world would be a better place if there were no women refugees. We do not mean that the world would be better if women were simply unable to flee intolerable conditions, or were killed while so doing. We mean that a more decent world would be one in which women were not driven out of their homes by force, threats of force, or at any rate did not feel so desperate they felt forced to flee. When X = Women refugees, propositions (1), (2), and (3) are painfully obvious. What, then, could possibly be the point of talking about the social construction of women refugees?”

Next, Hacking adds a precondition to his three theses:

“(0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable.”

After discussing essentialism, race, and emotions, Hacking offers six gradations of constructionist commitment that are reactions to his first three theses:

Historical: “Someone presents a history of X and argues that X has been constructed in the course of social processes. Far from being inevitable, X is the contingent upshot of historical events. A historical constructionist could be quite noncommittal about whether X is good or bad.”

Ironic: “Irony about X is the recognition that X is highly contingent, the product of social history and forces, and yet something we cannot, in our present lives, avoid treating as part of the universe in which we interact with other people, the material world, and ourselves.”

Reformist: “…takes (2.) seriously: X is quite bad as it is… having seen that X was not inevitable, in the present state of things, we can at least modify some aspects of X, in order to make X less of a bad thing.”

Unmasking: “Karl Mannheim… called “the unmasking turn of mind,” which does not seek to refute ideas but to undermine them by exposing the function they serve. Mannheim had learned from Marxism. The notion is that once one sees the ‘“extra-theoretical function” (Mannheim’s emphasis) of an idea, it will lose its “practical effectiveness.’” We unmask an idea not so much to “disintegrate” it as to strip it of a false appeal or authority.” (this is at the same level of gradation as reformist, for Hacking; they are side by side)

Rebellious: “A constructionist who actively maintains (1), (2), and (3) about X will be called rebellious about X.”

Revolutionary: “An activist who moves beyond the world of ideas and tries to change the world in respect of X is revolutionary.”

Then something useful that Hacking does is categorize three types of things that are said to be socially constructed:

(1) Objects: Items in the world (beyond obvious ones like rocks and particles, he also includes things like actions, gender, and classes here)

(2) Ideas: “conceptions, concepts, beliefs, attitudes, theories, both public and private.

(3) Elevator words: facts, truth reality, knowledge, which say something about the world or about what we think about the world. They are not ‘in the world’ in the sense objects are.

The next thing I found useful in this book was Hacking’s identification of three primary “sticking points” in the realist (structurist) vs constructionist debate:

(1) Contingency (First Sticking Point) - This is discussed to some extent in the above points on inevitability, but Hacking takes time to make this sticking point more concrete. He first explains how this sticking point emerges from ambiguities about what people mean by social construction:

“A first move is to distinguish between objects, ideas, and the items named by elevator words such as “fact,” “truth,” and “reality.” Quarks, in that crude terminology, are objects. But Pickering does not claim that quarks, the objects, are constructed. So the idea of quarks, rather than quarks, might be constructed. That is a bit of a let-down. Everyone knows that ideas about quarks emerged in the course of a historical process. To say that Pickering was writing about the idea of quarks, rather than the objects quarks, deprives his startling title of its novelty. That will not do. Pickering intended more than a history of events in high-energy physics during the 1970s, more than a history of ideas. What is this more? One radical notion, which prompts talk of construction, is that Pickering does not believe that the emergence of the quark idea was inevitable.”

Then he provides some explanation of what constructionists would maintain within the domain of physics:

“(a) physics (theoretical, experimental, material) could have developed in, for example, a nonquarky way, and, by the detailed standards that would have evolved with this alternative physics, could have been as successful as recent physics has been by its detailed standards. Moreover, (b] there is no sense in which this imagined alternative physics would be equivalent to present physics. The physicist denies that… Maxwell’s Equations, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the velocity of light. The contingency claim is that neither the law nor the equations nor the velocity (nor anything equivalent} are inevitable parts of any science as successful as present science.”

The imagined example here is would aliens somewhere else in the universe studying electromagnetic phenomena and arriving at a stable theoretical system have a set of theories that were translatable and equivalent to Maxwell’s equations. A big issue here is translatability and equivalence:

“…to use a thought that Quine used for basic formal logic, we would say that Alien sentences express statements of physics only if they are translatable into something recognizable as our physics.”

Hacking thinks that it is actually uncontroversial that there is some sort of construction involved in say something like mathematical proofs:

“The great figures of what was once called rational mechanics, men like Laplace and Lagrange working around 1800, were in some sense obtaining consequences of Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. But they had to invent the mathematics that would do it. They had to invent the language in which the conclusions could be expressed. They had to articulate the theory. They were not just joining up the dots to complete a picture. They had to put in the dots.”

As Hacking mentions slightly earlier in the book:

“The English translation renders Aufbau as “Structure,” but Aufbau means “construction” (or, in context, ‘“building’’}, and that is what Carnap meant. He wanted to establish that the world could be built up from elements, the data of sensory experience, or perhaps items that played a role in physical science. The logical positivists (aside from Otto Neurath) might have been troubled by some of the twists of constructionism in recent sociology. Not too upset: Thomas Kuhn is standardly presented as the originator of the modern trend toward social studies of science, but as Peter Galison (1990) has shown, there is a good deal in common between Kuhn and Carnap, and both men knew it. The roots of social constructionism are in the very logical positivism that so many present-day constructionists profess to detest.”

Hacking does not think there as much to fight over here as most have done in the past, because “the contingency thesis itself is perfectly consistent with such scientific realism… Pickering (1995a, 171) has become so mellow that he says he is agnostic about what he calls correspondence realism. He is right. Scientific realism simply does not matter to what he cares about, namely contingency.”

(2) Nominalism (Second Sticking Point) - we again return to what Hacking calls elevator words like: fact, real, true, and knowledge. He claims: “Nominalism is a fancy way of saying name-ism. The most extreme name-ist holds that there is nothing peculiar to the items picked out by a common name… Nominalists deny that nature has joints to be carved. Their opponents contend that good names, good accounts of nature, carve nature herself at her joints.
…One party hopes that the world may, of its own nature, be structured in the ways in which we describe it. Even if we have not got things right, it is at least possible that the world is so structured.
…The other party says it has an even deeper respect for the world. The world is so autonomous, so much to itself, that it does not even have what we call structure in itself. We make our puny representations of this world, but all the structure of which we can conceive lies within our representations.”

(3) External Explanations of Stability (Third Sticking Point) - I think Hacking summarizes this point well on p. 92:

“The constructionist holds that explanations for the stability of scientific belief involve, at least in part, elements that are external to the professed content of the science. These elements typically include social factors [Edinburgh school], interests [Marxists], networks [Latour and ANT], or however they be described. Opponents hold that whatever be the context of discovery, the explanation of stability is internal to the science itself.” (Comments in square brackets are my additions).

Just to briefly backtrack, Hacking feels the need to explain that during Kuhn’s time scientific discontinuities and disruptions had to be explained, whereas now, stability is something more likely needing explanation:

“Future historians of the history and philosophy of the sciences may suggest that Popper and Kuhn worked in unusual times. Events early in the twentieth century made them think that science is essentially unstable. From now on (it is already being said) future large-scale instability seems quite unlikely. We will witness radical developments at present unforeseen. But what we have may persist, modified and built upon. The old idea that the sciences are cumulative may reign once more.”

Hacking’s explanation of this sticking point largely draws on arguments between Weinberg and Kuhn:

“Other scholars would emphasize the role of empire, of the laying of telegraph cables be- low the seas, and across Persia to India, all of which had high priority in the minds of Kelvin, Heaviside, and Maxwell himself. Weinberg (1996b, 56) retorted that ‘Whatever cultural influences went into the discovery of Maxwell’s Equations and other laws of nature have been refined away, like slag from ore.” The British Empire and Sandemanianism are mere curiosities of bygone days, perhaps still casting their shadows in the worlds of politics and piety, but not in the natural sciences.”

“When Weinberg states that Maxwell’s Equations are as real as anything he knows, he means, among other things, that they are part of the inherent structure of the world. That takes us back to sticking point #2. Thus [A] is uncontroversial, but it leads Weinberg to [B], which turns out to involve two distinct stances, both of which we have encountered already, namely our first two sticking points, contingency and nominalism…
Kuhn was a nominalist, and Weinberg is an inherent-structurist.
I have just made an observation about Weinberg and Kuhn which is intended to respect both. Weinberg said he was trying to put his finger on differences between “cultural and historical relativists” on the one hand, and physicists like himself. He writes as it he is putting his finger on some ephemeral debate that has flourished these thirty years or so. I suggest his finger points at a pair of attitudes that have opposed each other for at least 2300 years.”

Hacking offers evidence of this long lineage by drawing analogies to arguments between rationalists and empiricists:

“Indeed, you can even cast historical debates between, for example, Locke and Leibniz in terms of external and internal. Leibniz thinks that the reasons underlying truths are internal to those truths, while Locke holds that (our confidence in) truths about the world is always external, never grounded in more than our experience… one favors internal understandings of what knowledge is, while the empiricist favors external explanations.”

Hacking interestingly also thinks through how internalism vs externalism relates to the traditional political spectrum, and his answer generally is not very neatly. He observes that Sokal (the NYU physics professor who submitted a bullshit paper to a theory journal's edition on the “Science Wars”, provoking what has come to be called the Sokal affair) identified as a person of the left and in “support of the oppressed.” Hacking says he doesn’t have anything to contribute to this debate, but offers an interesting comparison between Kuhn and Feyerabend and how they rated on the sticking point checklist. Though Feyerabend was best known as an anti-authoritarian, an anarchist of sorts perhaps, Hacking thinks he is low in terms of point (1) contingency and (3) external explanations of stability, and was only high on the scale of (2) nominalism. Whereas Hacking rates Kuhn a maximum 5 for all three points (even after noting earlier in the chapter that Kuhn was a self-described internalist). Hacking finally rates himself:

#1 Contingency: 2.
#2 Nominalism: 4
#3 External explanations of stability: 3

And I appreciate him encouraging his reader to also participate in his fun listicle personality quiz (more academic books should have this).

There’s so much else in this book, but I have to stop here. I’ll just leave a few excerpts I enjoyed below on history, Kant, and Lenin:

“It is true that Latour presented himself as an anthropologist, and many others who write about the sciences present themselves as sociologists. Nevertheless their individual case studies are histories. The waters may seem a little muddied here. Some of the most prominent early social studies of science came from Edinburgh in the 1970s. The Edinburgh school, as it was called, identified its work as sociological, and claimed that it was en- gaged in a scientific study of science. The theoretical positions of leading figures such as David Bloor and Barry Barnes, updated in Barnes, Bloor, and Henry (1996), were more the result of philosophy than sociology. The empirical work done by the school, well represented also by MacKenzie (1981) or Mulkay (1979), was historical in character.”

“Athough Latour would erase the adjective “social,” it is useful tor Haraway to have a name tor the school of constructionism that she takes to be represented by Latour, Knorr-Cetina, Mulkay, and Bijker. This is because there are many other schools. All of them, including social constructionism, seem to derive from Kant. Kant was the great pioneer of construction. Onora O’Neill’s book about Kant, Constructions of Reason (1989), is well titled. Kant was truly radical in his day, but he still worked within the realm of reason, even if his very own work signaled the end of the Enlightenment. After his time, the metaphor of construction has served to express many different kinds of radical philosophical theory, not all of them dedicated to reason.”

“Foucault began his intellectual career with Kant’s Anthropologie. Georges Canguilhem was on the mark in calling Les Mots et les choses a study of the historical a priori. Foucault was pursuing, in his own in- imitable and transtormative way, Kantian ethical themes of the well- made lite in his own final days.”

“The first years of the twentieth century were revolutionary times in- deed. Einstein had dethroned Kant, while Brouwer’s intuitionistic reasoning challenged Aristotle. Next in line were Lenin and the new quantum mechanics, the one trying to undo capitalism and and the other undoing causality.”

[Abner Rosenweig · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is objectively real and what is a construct? It may seem like a simple question, but as with all things, the closer you look, the more complex things become. Hacking's 'Social Construction of What' highlights this complexity and helped me to realize how much of reality is constructed in different ways. Hacking points out that seeing constructs can help to shake up a subject and unsettle surface assumptions. He reminds us that they are a tool for critical theory to help unmask structures of ideology, power, and control. And, to me, exploring the social construction of science doesn't threaten science at all--it only makes us aware of science's limits and suggests reality might be larger and more nuanced than we ordinarily assume. The book isn't an ideal introduction to construction theories. I was disappointed by the coverage of some of the issues and, at times, I felt Hacking's discussion got way off track, particularly with some of the re-purposed studies toward the end. But overall the book is a provocative epistemological study that heightens awareness of the loose and malleable boundaries of what we commonly accept as real.

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me a few years to read all the way through this text - it's dense and full of theory. Hacking addresses the theory of Social Constructivism and argues against it's perspective of relative experience, stating (as far as I understand) that while we can actively construct social definitions and reactions, this construction is only possible because there is a very real basis in experience that construction is reacting to, not creating indefinitely. He argues that social constructivism alone isn't an adequate description of human experience, as there is often a "real" experience that occurs outside of human interpretation. He uses some of his previously published essays to support his perspective.

One of the best quotes is actually Hacking quoting Steven Shapin (1996): "... science is a historically situated and social activity... it is to be understood in relation to the contexts in which it occurs." - he brings a different perspective to this quote (pg 66-67), but indirectly defines sociology's role as one that studies this context.

[Pavlogreen]

La polémica del constructivismo social y las guerras de la ciencia quedó atrás hace un par de décadas y, aunque de vez en cuando se la sigue mencionando, realmente no tiene mucho sentido considerarla un poblema filosófico actual. En ese sentido este libro no es demasiado contemporáneo, pues responde a una moda particular de finales de los 90. Pero Hacking es mucho más que un comentador de modas. Fue uno de los grandes filósofos de las últimas décadas y en este libro lo demuestra. A pesar de lo caduco del debate del constuctivismo social, este libro tiene reflexiones, ideas y propuestas perfectamente actuales y frescas que siguen siendo de utilidad para una filosofía de la ciencia bien temperada.

Hay que leer a Hacking.

[philosovamp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hacking considers the idea of "social construction" in a subtle, balanced and argumentatively charitable manner. As the title suggests, one must do a lot of work before even beginning to defend or criticize social construction, because it is not always clear what that means, what it pertains to, and who claims it. He lays out some useful distinctions about what social construction is and is meant to do, which anyone should find helpful. He also takes a closer look at Pickering, Latour, Kuhn and Feyerabend to determine what basic, and eternally contested, philosophical positions comprise "social construction."

Though he definitely winks about it pretty often, Hacking stays far away from the culture war bullshit and makes it strictly about philosophy of science. On that point, he is refreshing if a little quaint; at this stage in the social construction debate, which has only metastasized since this book was written, Hacking's book is a better base-line than you will generally find, if not up to the wider challenges at hand. To end on a sour note, the book peters out in a very unsatisfying way.

[Can Özer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a bit (a lot, actually) unfocused, and as much as I appreciate Hacking's prose, it is not enough to make the book an enjoyable read unless you are completely foreign to the discussions that Hacking goes over. If you're somewhat familiar with the issue, thing get repetitive. Nevertheless, the argumentation is clear, rigorous, and mostly justified.

[Mikael Cerbing · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first chapter was really good, strong 4 stars. After that it was a little up and down. I think the book struggled a bit by being in part put together by older texts by Hackings. The narrative/theoretical focus became a bit lacking.
But all in all a good book if you want to make a small dip into the thinking around social constructionism.

[Johann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the chapters on the philosophical bases of the science wars/constructionism disputes and on kindmaking/child abuse in particular. Didn’t read the chapter on weapons research. This guy is a great fence-sitter (complimentary).

- Contingency: 2
- Nominalism: 2
- External explanations of stability: 2 in the natural sciences, 4 in the social sciences