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His work
His research is built on identifying the cultural, social, institutional, cognitive and practical circumstances in which we can recognize the beginnings or historical emergence of how we see things, of styles of reasoning and of theories on ourselves and on the world that shape our contemporary orientation in the field of scientific knowledge. In this regard, at least two fields of Hacking’s genealogical research are exemplary: the theory of probability and the science of memory. -
Major Works
The Logic of Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. [First paperback edition 1976; Indian Student’s Edition, Calcutta, 1968]. A Concise Introduction to Logic. New York: Random House, 1972. Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. [Braille edition 1977; translations into Spanish in 1979, Dutch in 1980, German in 1984, Japanese in 1988, Italian in 1994 and Portuguese in 2000]. -
Work continued
He focus on the origins of the idea of probability in its twofold, objective and subjective aspect in the seventeenth century, and how it has developed in 19th century for social and institutional context of the control practices and government of populations. -
Major Works continued
The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Representing and Intervening, Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
And many more. -
Continued
He identifies probability with the mathof randomness/chance, that didn't appear until Renaissance. It has an epistemic element, with degrees of belief, having to do with the performance of randomizing devices in the long run of large numbers of trials. The first is epistemic or priori probability. Second is ontological and posteriori frequency statistics we get from experiments. Probabilities are theories used to establish degrees of belief. Statistics are experiments that may validate theories. -
Ian Hacking Lecture Video