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“... two, almost identical impulses? How did you become mentally ill? Besides, are you really ill? Ian Hacking has written a wonderful philosophical fable about these and several other equally fascinating questions. Its moral is simple, if somewhat untimely: what we call ‘mental illness’ is not a permanent, intangible reality. For it to develop, it ...”

“... brain is the way it is because it evolved to be that way is what you might call a no-brainer. As Ian Hacking said in the last issue of the LRB, quoting Steven Rose quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Since we use our brains to make up stories, and to make sense of the stories of ...”

“... about it, as patients sue their families and families sue therapists? In Rewriting the Soul, Ian Hacking suggests an answer: we are struggling with MPD because it is our current way of struggling with the nature of the soul. In Hacking’s argument, we become sick with MPD because we no longer have cultural ...”

“... semblance of social value. To argue in this way is to espouse the kind of dynamic nominalism which Ian Hacking proposes as a way of understanding the dilemmas of the human sciences. ‘Categories of people,’ Hacking suggests, ‘come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those ...”

“... and science’s rationalist proponents. Nor, of course, are they really ‘wars’. As Ian Hacking has pointed out, to call them that is to trivialise the horrors of real war. The ‘science wars’ attracted that name because in many ways they are a specialised version of the wider, but equally misnamed ‘culture wars’ of academia ...”

“... analysis – or rather in the conception of knowledge which this analysis presupposes? Ian Hacking holds that Foucault’s historical construction is in itself Foucault’s philosophy. Certainly it is a study of the ‘conditions of possibility for ideas’, which, according to Hacking, is precisely what we ...”

“... dramatic ending. In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995), Ian Hacking suggests that the 1970s model of multiple personality succeeded in part because it ‘provides the best available narrative frame for recovered memory’: ‘The multiple comes to understand that she is as she is now because of the way she ...”

“... is the concept of probability, a mathematical tool which is remarkable not least because, as Ian Hacking has shown, it was developed remarkably late in the history of Western thought. There is no hint of probabilistic reasoning in classical Greek thought, and even in the 16th century the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano could claim that when a ...”

“... His history is honestly presented as mostly a synthesis of the work of those scholars – Ian Hacking, Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Theodore Porter, Stephen Stigler, Mary Morgan and others – who have, since the 1980s, richly documented the development of probability and statistics. What is original about Desrosières is that he narrates the story ...”

“... but over the years, the subtitle clambered into first place and usurped the incumbent. As Ian Hacking remarks in a witty and astute foreword, this is rather like the Cheshire Cat leaving behind only its grin. Hacking suggests that the disappearance or suppression of the déraison is a sign that Foucault had ...”

“... taming it. This gives it a special political utility. ‘Probability cannot dictate values,’ Ian Hacking wrote in The Taming of Chance (1990), ‘but it now lies at the basis of all reasonable choices made by officials. No public decision, no risk analysis, no environmental impact, no military strategy can be conducted without decision theory ...”

“... in what is supposed to be a volume demonstrating the need for new ways of thinking in philosophy. Ian Hacking, for example, in his article ‘Five Parables’, ‘recants’ his own former view that philosophy consists of problems and their solutions, only to sketch a solution to every philosophical problem one has ever heard of!) Although he rejects ...”

“... book, Underground, he proposed that the attack provided an insight into the Japanese psyche: Ian Hacking (LRB, 19 October 2000) was convincingly unconvinced. More recently, as his translator Jay Rubin says in his critical biography, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words,* he has come to see the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway attack as ‘twin ...”

“... not insured. By the end of the 18th century, the quantitative transformation had given way to what Ian Hacking called an ‘avalanche of statistics’.Nowadays, critiques of quantification are ten a penny; it is easy to see the deficiencies of metrics when they are so often used against you. The attempt to count people can be invasive, even offensive to ...”

“... their conversation. The tape became the most important single piece of evidence in the phone hacking trial that has just come to an end. Blunkett avoided confirming Coulson’s story, saying that he was entitled to a private life. But he had a question of his own: how did Coulson know he was having an affair? ‘People do talk,’ Coulson said. He ...”