Ian Hacking once treated his main philosophical themes as three parts: styles of reasoning, maki... more Ian Hacking once treated his main philosophical themes as three parts: styles of reasoning, making up people, and the philosophy of mathematics. Current research on Hacking thinks experimental realism is relatively independent from these themes. Examining Hacking’s works from the 1980s to 1990s, this article argues that the concept of stability developed in experimental realism led him to think about the difference between natural sciences and human sciences in terms of their ontological basis, which was further developed in Hacking’s simultaneous studies on the history of statistics, and enabled him to formulate the theory of the looping effects. Hence, by analyzing the developing process and the complex meaning of the stability in Hacking`s context, I will establish a coherent thread between experimental realism and his other themes.
Ian Hacking once treated his main philosophical themes as three parts: styles of reasoning, maki... more Ian Hacking once treated his main philosophical themes as three parts: styles of reasoning, making up people, and the philosophy of mathematics. Current research on Hacking thinks experimental realism is relatively independent from these themes. Examining Hacking’s works from the 1980s to 1990s, this article argues that the concept of stability developed in experimental realism led him to think about the difference between natural sciences and human sciences in terms of their ontological basis, which was further developed in Hacking’s simultaneous studies on the history of statistics, and enabled him to formulate the theory of the looping effects. Hence, by analyzing the developing process and the complex meaning of the stability in Hacking`s context, I will establish a coherent thread between experimental realism and his other themes.
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