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The chapters in this section are introduced. They demonstrate the manifold ways in which the categories used for the scientific study of population problems have each been produced through historical processes of a strongly political character. The chapters document a number of ways in which intrinsically ambiguous linguistic forms are fixed and objectified to render them amenable to demographic analysis, often through the mediation of state apparatuses. They show that this typically entails significant costs, both in terms of the scientific analyses possible, and in terms of the rights of real people. As Ian Hacking has put it, representing is intervening; categories impose on contexts.

Science can show how our beliefs are produced by our interactions with the material world. Explaining how, e.g. we might have experiences of secondary qualities and why such experiences might be useful from an evolutionary standpoint even if, strictly speaking, they have no existence independent of us. Selection, as described in the previous chapter, only ensures that our cognitive abilities will be survival‐promoting rather than truth‐delivering. Science, however, must be responsive to observation and be intelligible to us and observability and intelligibility look like they are also relative to our natures. Science, as van Fraassen, Hacking, and Cartwright point out, also involves the production of artificial phenomena through experiment and involves a degree of idealization. Science, on this account, is a process by which embodied beings explore their world and, in being susceptible to a naturalistic explanation, is no different from our other methods of belief formation. Secondary qualities, given this, are no less real and science no more objective. A naturalistic evolutionary perspective on knowledge while not justifying our basic non‐sceptical epistemic standpoint also does not lead inevitably to scepticism.

Theoretical realism claims—against instrumentalism (Stegmüller), constructive empiricism (van Fraassen), entity realism (Hacking, Cartwright), and structural realism (Worrall)—that the theoretical terms of successful scientific theories refer to real entities in the world, even beyond the edge of direct observability, and the principles and laws in theories are true. Critical realism qualifies this view by employing the notion of truthlikeness, which in particular applies to theories containing approximations and idealizations. The notion of truthlikeness also allows a precise formulation of a charitable account of reference for theoretical terms: unlike in Fregean approaches, a theory may refer to an entity even though its description is only approximately true or truthlike. This shows that rival or successive theories may refer to the same entities in spite of the phenomenon of meaning variance or incommensurability. Illustrations of the realism debates are given in the fields of astronomy, quantum mechanics, psychology, and economics.

In his book The Social Construction of What?, Ian Hacking offers a schema for understanding different social constructionist claims along with a framework for distinguishing kinds or degrees of constructionist projects. Hacking's efforts are useful, but his account leaves many of the philosophical aspects of social construction projects obscure, as are the connections, if any, with more mainstream analytic philosophy projects. This chapter aims to argue that although Hacking's approach to social construction is apt for some of those working on such projects, it does not adequately capture what's at issue for an important range of social constructionists, particularly many of us working on gender and race. Moreover, a different way of understanding social construction reveals interesting connections and conflicts with mainstream analytic projects.

If racial categories are to be understood as positions in a social structure (as was argued in Chapter 7), then in principle one can be raced without incorporating that fact into one's self-understanding. How, then, should we understand racial identity? The chapter argues that a common model (suggested by Ian Hacking and developed by Anthony Appiah) that analyzes racial identity in terms of the content of one's intentions to act (e.g., as a person of race R) is inadequate to capture a broad range of unintentional and even unconscious behavior that is plausibly relevant to one's identity. The chapter offers an alternative proposal that takes into account unreflective, unintended, and unconscious aspects of racial embodiment.

This chapter explores the relationship between sociologists and their fields. This relation is strongly shaped by a dual fear that runs through the history of sociology: that of either losing epistemic distance and sociological identity trough over-involvement, or that of insufficient engagement through over-detachment from issues of concern. This dual fear dates back to positions of Weber and Marx and regularly resurfaces through e.g. discussions on Public Sociology. After reviewing such debates, this chapter introduces the emerging scholarly approach of situated intervention as an alternative way of relating sociologists and their fields. Drawing on the work of Ian Hacking on the importance of interlocking representing and intervening in the sciences, on the position proposed by Howard Becker of combining attachment with avoiding sentimentality, and on discussions within Science and Technology Studies on scholarly involvement, intervention is not presented as a matter of engagement but rather as an approach to producing sociological knowledge and normativity. Experiments with the organization of care thereby reclaim the notion of intervention from static understandings of objectivity and ethics.

As historians like Frances A. Yates have been able to look into how memory may be conceptualized in the context of specific historical moments, we realize that a history can be attributed to memory, and even to the “knowledge” of memory. While Yates has been able to focus on mnemonics and how this was found to be a requisite not just for learning but also for authoritative leadership, philosopher Ian Hacking points out how mnemonics was, however, a “knowing how,” since the subject in question is not undergoing the process of remembering certain parts of his or her own history. In his work entitled Rewriting the Soul, Hacking asserts that there is a relationship between personality and memory, thus resulting to the development of the field called psychodynamics. This chapter looks into Hacking's notion of “memoro-politics” and how this is concerned with the various aspects of the material self.

The chapter describes the various forms of physical and technological intrusion, some of which (such as the infamous telephone hacking conducted by journalists—and which sparked the Leveson Inquiry) may be employed by the media. They include biometrics, computer hacking, identity theft, DNA databases, and RFID. Legal means to repel such invasions are examined, such as trespass, nuisance, the intentional infliction of emotional harm, and protection against harassment is discussed.

This dialogue is preceded by an introduction about Richard Stallman and the power of “code”, by Lawrence Lessing, as well as a detailed biography of Richard revised by himself. In the conversation following this, Stallman analyzes the origin and validity of the ‘hacking’ and ‘hack’ concepts and the differences between ‘hackers’ and ‘crackers’. He then describes in detail the concept, dimension, forms of creation and the development of software code, especially free software and its implementation framework. He later reflects on and outlines his vision of the relationship between the use of technology and ethics, and about ethical hackers. He also talks about the good and bad behavior of companies and, in this context, his criticism of Corporatocracy. Afterward, he describes concepts about how the creation of software code works compared with other creative arts, such as literature. He goes on to analyze the mechanisms for how ideas are patented in the industrial world, in particular the case of software development. He finally talks about why his vision of free software remains valid and how it should be dealt with during education.

To show something to be “socially constructed” is to show it not to be natural; in this sense there’s something paradoxical in the thesis that nature is itself socially constructed. The thesis might be understood as meaning that nothing is natural, and that the distinction between the “natural” and the “social” makes no sense. “Construction” has to be understood literally. As natural beings, humans are constantly in the process of transforming their environment: they build it. Our relation to the world is active; we come to know it, as the history of epistemology from empiricism through Kant and Hegel and Marx (and Heidegger) shows, through our social practices. Such practices are prior to any putative distinction between matter and thought, nature and culture, or object and subject.

This chapter analyzes processes of hacking (ikhtirāq, tansīf) in Arabic fiction's multiple sites of production across media and cultural contexts. Focusing on Ahmed Alaidy's (b. 1974) iconoclastic manifesto of new writing, An Takun ʿAbbas al-ʿAbd (Being Abbas el Abd) (2003), I argue that the main preoccupation of this hacker-like author is with the immediacy of authoritarian Arab regimes. Challenging their political and cultural legitimacy, Alaidy's text stages a new scene of violence, meticulously deployed against Arab modernity's signifiers in social, educational, and literary contexts. Examining acts of desecrating books and state institutions, the chapter argues that Alaidy's new-generation antihero supplants the disoriented Arab traveler in Paris and London that one finds in al-Shidyaq, al-Tahtawi, and al-Shaykh. Displacing experiences of disorientation and fragmentation onto the text itself, this new writing manifesto ushers in a reconceptualization of the relation between the literary and the political in the Arab world.

This chapter discusses the past and related concepts, such as memory and the conditions for memorialization. It is often thought that once an experience moves into the past, it is over, giving the past a frozen or fixed structure. There are no other universes where events keep occurring as they do in this universe. However, if the past is over, a problem arises because the past still structures the present. How can the past continue to have a living relation to the present if it is gone? Philosophical questions about the past must be asked so that possible answers may be discovered. The chapter focuses on contemporary philosophy, particularly the work of Ian Hacking, and the contributions of the German and French traditions to the discussion of these topics.

This chapter argues that the Empiricist account provides a direct link between laws and determinism, and that the causal account does not. The popularity of the Empiricist account of laws in the twentieth century may explain the prevalence of the assumption that a law-governed world must also be deterministic. However, the argument from Empiricist laws to determinism is no better than its premises, and it has already been seen that there are compelling objections to the Empiricist account of laws. These objections also weaken any support that account might give to determinism. To the extent that we ought to favor a causal account of laws, whether those posed by Cartwright and Hacking or the one developed in the Cognitive Pluralist formulation, a commitment to such laws is perfectly compatible with a commitment to free will.

This chapter reflects on the partnership between Gendered Intelligence and the Science Museum and highlights the importance of gender diversity in collaborative projects. It discusses how co-produced research impacts both organisations and conversations through the ways in which museums posit particular values and ‘norms’ around gender identity. The chapter also outlines the ‘Hacking In’ project and the impact it had on the partners involved, and reflects on the potential within collaborative projects to redress and acknowledge the power imbalances that exist within the narratives of cultural institutions. It offers a study about empowerment and the social responsibility to include, listen to, and work with those whose histories, stories, and identities have been marginalised, excluded, or communicated with little, if any, involvement from those communities.

This chapter makes important distinctions between pre- and post-eighteenth-century uses of the terminology of ‘circumstances’, ‘proof’, and ‘probability’. It shows that prehistories of probability such as those of Ian Hacking and Douglas Patey have underestimated its rhetorical and imaginative dimensions. Reading Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, Johannes Weltkirchius, and Rudolph Agricola, the chapter shows how classical and Renaissance treatments of circumstances (time, place, manner, motive, etc.) associate them not only with argument and narrative, but use circumstantial detail to arouse emotion and to produce vivid mental images (ekphrasis and enargeia). The chapter concludes with a reading of Lucrece that shows Shakespeare’s awareness of the association of probability, circumstances, emotion, and enargeia, and with a reading of King Lear that links its imagined offstage world to Lucrece’s characterization of ‘Opportunity’.

What do the histories of the ionosphere and the Earth’s crust have in common? Ionospheric physics and crustal seismology have parallels and dissimilarities. The epilogue explores these points of contact on several levels. Moreover, it holds that a sociocultural conception of entity realism provides a fresh viewpoint on the study of the history of geophysics. It contends that Ian Hacking’s idea of entities as instruments of inquiry, intervening with and causing new phenomena, is not entirely appropriate for the present case. Rather, it suggests the use of entities as functional tools—an engineering function, responding to specific technical and commercial needs. The epilogue concludes that pragmatic rather than epistemic reasons lie behind this realism of social and cultural origin.