History of Human Sciences

I am a philosopher of the particular case An interview with Holberg prize winner 2009 Ian Hacking.

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History of Human Sciences HHS-10-0009 Original Articles Holberg prize, Ian Hacking, Interview, History of science, Philosophy of science

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I am a philosopher of the particular case An interview1 with Holberg prize winner 2009 Ian Hacking.

Abstract When Ian Hacking won the Holberg International Memorial Prize 2009 his candidature was said to strengthen the legitimacy of the prize after years of controversy. We have talked to Ian Hacking about current questions in the philosophy and history of science.

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The early Hacking

MS: I would like to start out this interview with some of your earlier works like The Logic of Statistical Inference and The Emergence of Chance, if you would care to comment on those. In those works you seem to say that its not enough today to know the definition of todays statics but we also need to know something about the history of statistics. Hacking: Not enough for what?

MS: I guess enough to be a competent philosopher of science? H: Well, theres many ways of being a statistician and of dealing with the foundations of statistics, and I think there a lots of problems about the foundations of statistics which has nothing to do with the origin of statistics, I really wouldnt want to make that claim.

MS: But, could you say something about what you think happens in the history of statistics in the 17th, 18th century that perhaps is of relevance for todays thinking.

H: Well, look, its not so much about todays thinking about statistics, its more about how we came to live in a universe of chance in which we think of everything in terms of probabilities. The newspapers are constantly concerned with probabilities of sport, equally of sex; everybody reads stories about diseases all the time. When a new building is to be put up in the hill here, there will be an environmental protection report which will discuss the risks and analysis. We think in physics of phenomena as being essentially indeterministic, and in all the studies about the genome, and illness and ancestry, and so on, what you get are probabilities. We live in that world,
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This interview is based on a talk carried out by Ole Jacob Madsen with Ian Hacking in Bergen, Norway on the 23rd of November, and written questions handed to him before and after the handing out of the Holberg prize.

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there was no such world in the 17th century. Im interested in how that complete change in our conception of the universe and ourselves in it came into being. And I think thats the story I wanted to tell as the first part of in The Emergence of Probability, and in the second part of The Taming of Chance, but thats not to say that I explain anything about any difficult question about the foundation of statistical reason. MS: Your work The Taming of Chance might be considered as a sequel or a follow up of The Emergence of Probability? H: Yes. Its about our fully coming to live in a universe of chance. That was the result of something that happened only at the beginning of the 19th century. There was what I call an avalanche of printed numbers. Statistical data used to be thought of as a state secret statistics = numbers for the state. But after the Napoleonic wars a great many numbers of almost anything became publically available in printed tables... There were a lot of regularities, for example in the rates of suicide at different times of the year in different communities. This began to give the idea that there are stabilities in what seemed to be chance-like events. In this way, chance began to be tamed by an army of statistics. MS: You also seem to discover sort of a shift in the Enlightenments belief in human nature, in which we start to develop this idea of normal people?

H: Yes, thats what I say. I dont know whether its true, but thats what I say.

MS: What does this shift imply?

H: Well, the Enlightenment idea of human nature is enormously important. It really is what provided the conceptual framework for the emergence of democracy and the American and the French revolutions. Human nature is at the heart of the American and the French constitutions. So, thinking that there is a human nature and that there are human rights comes out as an Enlightenment idea which thanks goodness we have, I mean, it makes out some of the things that we/I count as decent in our society is a product of that, and theres a conception of being all humans are equal, and there is a nature which humans have, and that nature entitles people to various rights and gives them various obligations for everybody. Its a universal idea, whereas for the 19th centurys idea is that there is an enormous amount of variation between people. But, its not just variation, that there are regularities in this variation, and there is a Gaussian curve (normalfordelingskurven) of any particular attribute of humanity whether it is the length of peoples arms or the speed with which they can run, or (they used to say) the extent to which they
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were morally responsible. But anyway, it no longer becomes the Human, it becomes the average man with dispersion, and then we get the idea that its important to normalize people. For instance that psychiatric patient is a deviation from the norm, and that the goal of medicine and the goal of much else connected with people is making us normal. Thats a very different conception of human than the Enlightenment one MS: Yes, so the whole idea of normality in that sense is pretty recent invention? H: Well, in my scale of reason yes, for most young people today, recent is six years ago and thats the end.

Normality, making up people and the human sciences MS: I think it is fair to say that you hold the opinion that the idea of normality evolved from statistics and that this has had a huge impact on for instance the concept of Body Mass Index and its influence on the understanding of our own bodies. This is an example of a scientific concept which in other words has influenced the understanding of our self and of the understanding of normality. In what way will you say that statistics have influenced our understanding of our selves

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and normality?

H: Allow me to expand a little on the relation between statistics and our notions of what is normal. Normality did not evolve from statistics; rather, they share a common trajectory. My chapter 19, The Normal State, in The Taming of Chance, tells a complex story. The idea of the normal as opposed to the pathological arises most clearly in medical discourse around (to choose an arbitrary centennial number) 1800. That is the same time that disease, criminality, suicide, and much else begin to be counted, tabulated, and published, a phenomenon that accelerates into the 1830s, and which I call the avalanche of printed (public) numbers. The normal becomes equated with the average, and so normality and statistics begin to share twin careers, to the point where the Gaussian distribution a bell-shaped curve of any phenomenon begins to be taken for granted as normal. Now to your question. It is obvious that sociology of the numerical sort is statistical in nature. I think it began with suicide statistics early in the nineteenth century, and has gone on expanding its domain ever since. Inevitably more and more kinds of human behaviour are studied, and increasingly we quantify the idea of what behaviour is normal. There is a hidden pun here, a play between description and prescription. Deep in the original meaning of the very word
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norm is the thought that norms are right. The word derives from for example the idea of a right angle. That means 90, which is descriptive, but it is also, for many purposes, such as carpentry, the angle that is right. What is normal is not just how we are, en masse, but how we ought to be. So descriptive statistics becomes prescriptive. We have come to live in a normalizing society, one which strives to make everyone normal, which is what most people are, or are thought to be, already. But every case is different. You mention the Body Mass Index, which is a cheap, superficial, way of quantifying a persons build. It is just your weight in kg divided by the square of your in metres. So obviously the heavier you are, for a given height, the higher your BMI. That is just one convenient index among many possible ones. Shortly after the Second World War it was used in Norway for a massive health survey, and low BMI was taken to be a cheap useful indicator of susceptibility to tuberculosis, which was a serious problem in some regions of the country at that time. Now we attend almost exclusively to high BMI. In 1998 the World Health Organization codified this. It divided regions of the index into underweight (BMI less than 20), normal (between 20 and 25), overweight (between 25 and 20), and obese (over 30). But here the normal is rather arbitrary. As was shown in the original Norwegian survey, the curve of mortality with BMI is shaped like a bathtub, going up steeply below 20 and above 30. But the implication of our nomenclature is that being overweight, (between 25 and 30), is bad for you, while in fact mortality is relatively flat up to 30. Certain kinds of risk factors do increase over 25, but not in the way that illness and death go up drastically over 30.

Now the emphasis on overweight in popular views of the BMI does not derive from statistics at all. In our current aesthetics you will be more attractive if you have a BMI between 20 and 25, and better able to walk fast uphill, but it wont kill you. Being obese does tend to shorten your life. This is not a simple story of statistics influencing our sense of ourselves, but a complex recent history. MS: In one of your most influential essays Making up People2 the essay starts out with a claim from philosopher Arnold Davidson in his book The Emergence of Sexuality: Perversion was a disease created by a new (functional) understanding of disease in the late nineteenth century. This claim of making up people as you call circle widely in our culture, and your aim is no less than to develop a general theory of how making up people can occur. And not only that: You

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First published in T. C. Heller, M. Sosna and D. E. Wellbery (1986) (Eds.). Reconstructing individualism: autonomy, individuality and the self in Western thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Later printed in I. Hacking, (2004.) Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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also want to know how this idea of making up people affects our idea of what it means to be an individual. Here you develop your central notion of looping effects which describes the reciprocity relationship between people and categories. Could you enlighten the reader on how you see this making up people process occurs, and how it affects us? H: You say that I want, no less than to develop a general theory of how making up people can occur. Well, that is not quite true. My very first paper on the topic, to which you refer, ends by saying here I quote myself: Just because my dynamic nominalism invites us to examine the intricacies of real life, it has little chance of being a general philosophical theory. [] I see no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories of two different instances of making up people.

I do think there is a widespread phenomenon I called looping. Classifying people has an effect on how they conceive of themselves, they internalize how they are classified, but also, they may adapt how they are because of the classification, to the extent that the classification has to be modified in the light of how the people classified have themselves changed. Sometimes this is quite easy to establish my story of multiple personality in the book Rewriting the Soul is an all too easy illustration. Patients diagnosed with multiple personalities adapted their behaviour to fit the diagnosis, but also exaggerated it, so that whereas when the diagnosis started, patients had two or three personalities, whereas in a few years, they had on average 17! So the behaviour of the patients looped back on the description of the disorder.

Other cases are much more complex. In general we are not concerned with a simple interaction between a classification and the people classified. The network of interactions involves knowledge, both popular and specialist, and experts who make the classifications and develop the specialized knowledge. It involves above all institutions. I began with the thought that a new classification may not just sort people in a new way, but bring into being a new kind of person, a new way to be a person. Then I amplified this to the way in which people of a kind may affect the kind itself the looping. The thought is summed up in the title of a recent paper, Kinds of people: moving targets. When we discover a new kind of beetle, or a new kind of mineral, or a new kind of subatomic particle, we classify in a new way, but our classification does not interact with the insect or rock we have identified. We tend to think it is just the same, with recognizing a new kind of person. To use your loaded example, which by now has been too-overworked for me to want to return to the subject, perverts were just there to identify, a kind of person that medicine got round to recognizing, and then the law got round to punishing. But kinds of people

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are not like kinds of beetle. In the case of perverts we have a striking example of a relatively recent phenomenon, of how a kind of person can take control of the kind and redefine it both in theory and in action. Homosexuals have taken control of a classification originally introduced by medicine and the law. That is one of the things that gay pride is all about. MS: There is currently an ongoing debate in the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet about whether diagnosis is useful or not in therapeutic treatment, and to what extent. Professor Siri Gullestad who is a trained psychoanalysist and a skeptic regarding the extensive use of diagnosis in current treatment wrote there are existential differences among I am afraid of making a fool of myself and I have social phobia. Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, which you met at Litteraturhuset in Oslo, has argued along similar lines. He has for instance stated that it is almost no longer possible just to be fed up any more, you are depressed. My question to you who has worked a great deal with different diagnosis and self-understanding, and you are also due to publish a book on implications of biotechnology called Identities, is if you would agree with Gullestad and Svendsen here that this is a crucial distinction, or not? H: I share their dislike of the medicalization of unhappiness and distress. I agree that DSM-IV 300.23 Social Phobia (Social Anxiety Disorder), produces a different sense of self from I avoid social interactions for fear of making a fool of myself. But in criticizing the diagnostic manual it is all too easy to fall into easy rhetoric that I also dislike. For example, at least in English, I am fed up is not a manifestation of depression.

There are people who are incapacitated by depression, and their pain is not to be trivialized. There are anxiety disorders that are not to be mocked. Yes, I think it is a moral defect to turn ones difficulties and unhappiness into a label currently favoured by drug companies; it is a refusal, sometimes cowardly, to strive for self-understanding. It is a merit of the people you cite that they challenge the pharmaceutical corporations and their agents in the healing professions, but it is a failing that they appear to generalize and appear to gloss over the core examples of, for example, intense black and soul-destroying depression. A few may suffer from it for the benefit of all peoples no better example than Munch. But if people with no great talent can be relieved of some of his symptoms, then any compassionate thinker would want that. MS: Why do certain diseases appear at some times throughout history and why do they disappear? In your book Mad Travelers (1998) you track how a mental disease suddenly appeared in Bordeaux, spread to several European countries, only to disappear again. Here you point to certain societal changes, or changes in the medical thinking at the time? Something I find very
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peculiar is that mad travelers disease affected men, whereas its modern day equal - dissociative disorder affects almost only women. Is the why-question maybe the kind of impossible question that never can get a meaningful answer and you sought to avoid? H: There are all sorts of quite different stories to tell. You see I resist generalizing! Malaria is fascinating. When the Nile was tamed in ancient Egypt, large expanses of stagnant water came into existence, side by side with concentrations of farmers. So lots of mosquitoes bred, and a parasite developed with people as hosts. But then a mutation connected with human haemoglobin which provided some protection against malaria. A very similar thing happened in West Africa around 900 CE, when extensive yam cultivation came into being. I am starting with this example because it is quite different from what you have in mind. In the book Mad Travelers I discussed what I called transient mental illnesses that appear to exist only at a particular time and place. I used a 1880s European epidemic of mad Travelers for my example. This was motivated by my previous work on multiple personality. I could also have used anorexia, and quite a few other disorders of our time, but I wanted a problem that had come into existence and then waned and disappeared. I then produced a model of what I called ecological niches, in which such transient disorders thrive. They disappear when the niche disappears. This is a close to a general theory as I have come, when thinking about

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making up people.

A few years ago I was consulted by some Swedish authorities, on the vexed question of children of families seeking refugee status in Sweden they came from a small number of parts of the world, chiefly the former Yugoslavia and Islamic former Soviet republics. The children would stop eating, stop interacting with the family, and generally drop out to the extent that they required tube feeding just to stay alive. It is still a very contentious issue in Sweden, with a rather sensational book about it recently published. In fact I do not think this problem fits my idea of ecological niches very well. Once again it is a different story. You will be beginning to notice that I am not keen on generalizations: I am a philosopher of the particular case. Back to mad travelers: you ask, why were they mostly men? One good reason is that it is too dangerous for a woman to wander in a sort of dazed state, sleeping rough, for hundreds of kilometers on end. The niche was possible by a nexus of virtuous/vicious models available in society at the time, the virtuous being the new middle class enthusiasm for touring, the vicious being widespread vagrancy. Vagrants were male, and for good reason: danger. I do not have such a simple explanation of why dissociative disorders in our day affect primarily women. You can

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start towards an answer by thinking about the symptom pool for womens mental illnesses from the days of neurasthenia and hysteria, going back to 1850. The symptoms involved just are socially acceptable ways for women to manifest their deep unhappiness. The reasons for the sex ratios in those two cases may be strictly cultural. Other sex ratios are known to have a biological foundation. Some we just do not know. Why are four out of five children diagnosed with autism male? There is a probably a neurological or biochemical explanation for that, but we understand so little about autism that speculation may be idle. Autism is not a transient mental illness, but there is certainly a looping effect story to be told, and which bears on the extraordinary extension of the class of autistic behaviours over the past three decades.

MS: Im very curious about the case you mentioned from Sweden about the case of the of the refugee seekers children from the former Yugoslavia and former Islamic republics of the Soviet Union who would stop eating, talking and generally drop out. H: Yes, we can spend all day talking about this; its a very interesting question. I gave some talks in Uppsala in the fall of 2006. Two people came to talk to me about these children. One, Marie Hessle, was the chair of a national commission on asylum seeking children who basically drop out of society and their families. They had stopped eating, talking, and sometimes went into something like a coma. She came with the sociologist, Nader Ahmadi, who was studying the situation and directly reporting to the Commission. They thought I might be able to help because of my ideas about transient mental illnesses explained in the book Mad Travelers. We spent a long time together, and they told me a lot, all of which was of course news to me. I learned that between 2001 to 2005 there were about 400 of these children who basically just stopped everything. They were usually the oldest child in the family. Most of the families were either Roma from parts of the former Yugoslavia, or they were mostly from former Muslim Soviet republics. But the people are not simply adherents of Islam. The Asian children were usually always from persecuted minorities. Some were Uighurs from Kazakhstan. Uighurs make up less than 2% of the population, while more than 50% are Kazakh; both are Muslim, but do not share the same attitudes to their religion. The Central Asians and the families from the Balkans are demographically two completely different populations, but with the same symptoms. A number of Swedish doctors became advocates for these children, believing them to be seriously ill, inconsequence of what had happened to them in their home countries and of their reception in Sweden. They thought the

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children should be hospitalized, and that the entire family should be given support of a psychological sort. The Commission was by no means sure this was the right approach, fearing that the resulting media hype made it worse. I happen to have quite extensive e-mails both from the medical school, in the person of dr. Gran Bodegrd from Stockholm. At one point the children and families under his care took up almost the entire pediatric psychiatry ward in the main hospital in Stockholm. These events were very heavily debated in the Swedish media when I was there. I found that I could go up to the bar in the hotel and say: Do you know about this? And the people at the bar would say: Oh, yes, and then they would have various opinions. Anti-immigration activists said that the children were faking. Some extreme conservatives suggest that the parents were maybe poisoning the children in order to make them sick. On the other hand many good socialists were saying, these sad stories show that we are not treating the refugees right. It is a national disgrace: We have got to sort this out! You can sea the extent to which the issue became politicized. This didnt leak into Norway, you

didnt hear about it?

MS: No, I havent really, Norwegian media is sometimes accused of being too focused on what goes on in Norway, but it might just be my own fault that I havent paid attention. H: And, now quite recently an investigative journalist Gellert Tamas has published a sensational book De Apatiska. Om makt, myter og manipulasjon (2009). I am told that he writes in a quite sensational way. He did a previous book about a second-generation immigrant who shot down a number of foreigners. This was also something of an expos, which was turned into a TV miniseries.3 This time he was very much on the side of the doctors; he accuses many people in the press and in the government of being racists, and just wanting to kick all the refugees out of the country. Readers have inferred that the national Commission was racist too, but, I know this is false because I spent say so much time talking to the head of the commission, Hesse, and her sociologist colleague, Ahmadi. They are not racists. These issues died down for a couple of years but are very much in the air again. In the beginning I just made notes for myself. But this year I took up the topic again because an editor asked me to write a piece on culture-bound psychiatric syndromes. And I thought: this is a really interesting story. I have circulated what I wrote to a number of stakeholders

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Gellert Tamas, Lasermannen en berttelse om Sverige (2002) Stockholm: Ordfront.

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and other knowledgeable people in Sweden, so I expect quite a lot of feedback. It is difficult for an outside who does not read Swedish to become clear about what is going on, but I do think I may have some positive suggestions to make, M: Thats very interesting, and one thing that I found interesting is that you mentioned that this case perhaps doesnt fit with your idea of ecological niches H: Well, I think its very specialized, though there is a phenomenon which was actually suggested to me in connection with another bunch of disorders by a graduate student of mine. Andr LeBlanc. He had proposed it in connection with phenomena like hypnosis and various hysteria-like disorders where theres a strong element of (what I call) first imitation and then internalization. Lets just take the asylum-seeking children in Sweden. I think there really was a child, who broke down both as a consequence of horrible things that happened before leaving the home country, and also under the family pressure of wanting asylum and having difficulty getting into Sweden because they cant convince the authorities that they are genuine refugees and not opportunity refugees. One child really does break down, this gets a lot of publicity in the media right away, and then some other children do just imitate it, its a way of getting attention for them. But as they imitate it, they gradually take on these symptoms and they really internalize them. Its a bit like the person who goes into a hypnotic session and says: oh, lets play along for a while, but after a while really is hypnotized, even when it began just by pretending. I think this phenomenon occurs not so infrequently. I call it Imitation and Internalization. And, of course this suits the national commission because it may seem that it is not a real medical problem, and so it is right to be so cautious about medicalization. It suits the doctors because the children really do end up with these symptoms, they are totally internalized. They have become part of the psyche. Thus, this picture of mine may prove to be attractive to both sides.

MS: Through your works you have made out an important distinction between transient mental illnesses and non-transient mental illnesses. I was wondering if you could say something on how you manage to come to a conclusion about that distinction. How do we know whether an illness is transient or lasting? H: The idea is tricky, but it occurs only at certain times at certain places, and it comes into being and disappears. And, some illnesses are transient for chemical reasons. The virus gets weak in the population and disappears. But its also ones that have no biochemical or neurological explanations of why they come into people being diagnosed and have all the symptoms etc.
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MS: In Mad Travelers for instance your write the following about the distinction: But this [is] a matter of faith, hope, and charity. Some mental disorders are, in my opinion, real. In the case of schizophrenia, for example, despite the conflicting claims, I hope that within twenty years we shall have a grip on one or two or perhaps three fundamental types of schizophrenia. (p. 98). You also hold the view that autism is not a transient illness. Do you have certain criteria that you use to make this distinction for instance scientific discoveries perhaps genetic or biological causes or is it merely down to personal convictions, hope and charity as you write? H: A mental illness is transient if it occurs only at a time (a shortish time, a few decades at most), and in one (or a few scattered) place (s) on the planet. Autism might be a candidate for transience, having been diagnosed only in the past 60 years, and having expanded exponentially in the past 20. But it is not my personal conviction when I state that it is not transient, and when I say that something answering to current descriptions has been with human beings forever, but has only been separated out rather recently. This is the conviction of nearly everyone who works in the field. We hope that biomedical research will give us some understanding of causes. I charitably excuse a lot of the rubbishy talk about autism that is current. I have faith in the long term resilience of inquiry. Here I am, as you know, mimicking C. S. Peirce.4 MS: In a fairly recent paper you wrote Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity in the journal Daedalus you in the end refer to a public speech you gave to an audience on the topic of People and Cyborgs. There you posed a question to the audience What do you think is the most dangerous idea around today? Well, to turn your question to yourself: What answer would you give to your own question?

H: In fact it was not my question. In the autumn of 2004 the journal Foreign Policy ran a symposium on the worlds most dangerous ideas. It posed a question to eight leading intellectuals. Which idea now in circulation would be most harmful to the world as we know it, if it were to be carried through? (That is a more precise question than the one you attribute to me.) Few of the answers were surprising. One was prescient, free money. The author foresaw the financial mess that greedy American bankers were cooking up, and which would erupt in 2007, and lead to a vast amount of unemployment and further industrial decline in 2008. The only surprise in the eight responses was Fukuyamas. The worst idea now going the rounds is Transhumanism. I asked this same question of an audience with whom I was discussing people and cyborgs, and I mentioned one astonishing response, the idea that we should not evolve.
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Hacking is her referring to chapter 4 of Mad Travelers where he subscribes to C.S. Perice pragmatic notion of truth where what counts as truth is at any time decided by the degree of consensus among leading investigations.

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Fukuyama and for example Jrgen Habermas are really scared of the idea of planned human evolution. I too am very cautious about it, but doubt that it is such a terrible threat to humanity. I am by nature optimistic about technological advance, notwithstanding all the awful things we have done with technologies. I cannot think which idea now in circulation would be most harmful to the world as we know it, if it were to be carried through. This implies a new or recent idea which has not yet been fully implemented, and I find myself unclear about how to answer the question. Maybe I am too complacent, too optimistic. But you asked a different question, What do you think is the most dangerous idea around today? I think the most dangerous idea is not a new one but an old one, We cannot make any difference, so it is not worth trying. The best response is one I learned from the Quakers when I was more active politically than I am now, Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

His connection to Michel Foucault

MS: If you allow I would also like to go into an important reference for youre writing pretty early was the French philosopher Michel Foucault and his several works on the genealogy of the human institutions. I think it could be interesting to talk a little about his influence and the difference between you to when doing philosophy. It isnt obvious how an analytical philosopher in the first place came to build up an interest for Foucault. H: Look, theres a simple straight forward anecdote: I went to work for two years in Uganda, teaching at Makere University College, paid for by the Canadian government. Part of an aid program. And while I was there a colleague gave me a copy of Foucaults first book on madness. And that just gave me a completely different way of thinking about both the past and the present; I mean Foucault sometimes spoke of the history of the present. He, unlike his disciples, never kept on using a phrase. Once he had put it into circulation he would drop it. But at that time the history of the present was for real. And since I was thinking about probability at that time I came to think about the history of probability in a very different way, so that the emergence of probability would really be a history of the present. So that was a completely new starting point. And the other book I wrote at the same time, published the same year: What does language matter to philosophy? (1975), is also a clearly a Foucault-influenced book. I mean, I dont write like Foucault at all. He writes beautifully. MS: Well, so do you!

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H: Im probably (secretly) proud of the way I write, but we write in totally different way. I admire his writing, but I never strived to imitate him. And, also hes a far, far more original thinker than I could ever imagining being. I just think his astonishing in the richness of his ideas. So, I learned from him. I think I really made use of some things from him, though Id never think of it as being a disciple or anything. I would always want to acknowledge how much I learned from reading his books. And The Emergence of Probability is obviously written by somebody whos just read The Order of Things. MS: Your former colleague professor Dagfinn Fllesdal wrote in a news-chronicle in Aftenposten (24.11.09) about you and the Holbergprize. Fllesdal wrote that your where a deserved winner that would give the prize much needed reputation. In his chronicle, Fllesdal also mentions a peculiar episode going back to your time at Stanford University in California when you two gave a course on French philosophy: Manipulated quotes [Paragraph headline] When we came to Foucault we discovered that many of Foucaults quotes where manipulated. Paragraphs that dont fit in, is left out, without the text mentioning it. When we read the quotes in its entirety we discovered that they didnt always fit with Foucaults theories. In addition, the quotes are picked from a selection of texts, and there is no guarantee that other texts from the save period fits the theory. After we had discovered this, Hacking invited me to his office. There, he held his book manuscript over the paper bin and carefully tore it to pieces. Hacking never published a book on Foucault. [Our translation] Aftenposten, 24.11.09. Fllesdal goes on to say that even if you where disappointed, your admiration of Foucault didnt stop. Fllesdal then recommends your books rather than Foucaults, since they are clearer and more thorough when it comes to argument. Can you confirm this episode, that you did wrote a book on Foucault that your refrained to publish and that you discovered that Foucault didnt follow scientific norms and rules when it came to sources? H: It was a long time ago, 1976. Dagfinn Fllesdal and I gave a joint course titled Structuralism and Knowledge. Because of my interests, Fllesdal generously made Foucault the main author whom we read. (This despite the fact that Foucault always denied he was a structuralist!) My memories are a bit different from Fllesdals. Yes, we found problems with Foucaults citations. I have always been pretty lenient about this, because I think that the main thrust of his analysis is correct. I give examples of his errors, and explain my willingness to be generous about them, in a
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little squib I wrote much later, Night Thoughts on Philology, reprinted in my Historical Ontology. At the time I was trying to write a book explaining Foucault to an English language readership which, in 1976, had not yet taken to his work. I became increasingly dissatisfied with what I was writing. Finally I decided I had to stop. So one day I took the entire manuscript, at least 200 pages of self-typed material, and fed it into the large dustbin in the Stanford quad outside the philosophy department. A number of grad students watched in glee one joked that each student present should salvage a chapter and use it for his PhD thesis. Fllesdal recalls that I also tore up some small part of the book earlier, in his presence, right after one of our classes had met. Doubtless at that moment I was moved by dissatisfaction with Foucault, but I destroyed the whole typescript because I was dissatisfied with myself. I came to the conclusion that Foucault is the man to read about Foucault. There are now a hundred books about Foucault, and I still think Foucault is the only one to read. In my Introduction 2006 to a new edition of The Emergence of Probability, I explain my immense debt to Foucault. I learned from Foucault a new way to do philosophy. I never imitated or copied him, as so many have done in so many disastrous ways. I was already a highly trained analytic philosopher, which I still am. Then I internalized something that I found in him and became a new kind of thinker. A new voice, a new way as a friend said to me in 1975. (He said it in French: voix, voie). Not Foucaults voice, but mine, less loud, less important, but deeply influenced. I should say also that it is only one of the ways in I which I do philosophy. In Historical Ontology I mention a departure talk I gave to the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, before I left for Stanford. It was called One Way to do Philosophy. Please bear that in mind, when you are reading my stuff.

MS: I recently read a written version of the talk you did at the anniversary of The Order of Things. H: Oh, yes my goodness, how did you get hold of that? MS: I think someone had put it on the internet, probably Wikipedia actually. But I look it up and so I read it. H: Well, you never know what you find out. Somebody gave me a short time ago a book in Italian which is a pirated translation of lectures I gave at College de France! Anyway, so I didnt know this was available.

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MS: No, but if you allow me to use it, you said something interesting there. You said that you didnt want to think about, you know, the famous ending in The Order of Things were Foucault seems to go on to say that man didnt exist before the 15th century and will cease to exist in the future. H: Yes, a wonderful paragraph. MS: Im wondering, is there still perhaps reasonable to say that you followed Foucault on this historizing tendency, but differed from it when it comes to embracing the sort of radical thinking that was fashionable in France at the time of your writing, is that true? H: I think that particular bit of Foucault was a fashion; a particular way of thinking. And, he really thought it was very important to linguistically break down patterns of language which we use, so that radical playwriting and innovative fiction had a profoundly intellectual effect on everything. Unfortunately I used to swallow that for a while, but I just dont think its true MS: During our talk you gave a very interesting answer to a question on Foucault and the radical impulses in his thinking that was fashionable in France at the time. You said that it was important for Foucault to linguistically break down barriers (and also for a lot of literature and play-writing at the time), and that you used to swallow it, but not any more. H: I meant no more than that the extreme challenges to linguistic convention, such as in the plays and other writings by Antonin Artaud, once fashionable in Paris, did not in fact have any significant effect on language or the way anyone speaks. (Nor did Foucaults one-time hero, Raymond Roussel.) I do think that Foucault and some others at the time opened up new directions for thought and talk, but not by smashing hindrances in language. Rather they used language, our ordinary language, to teach us new ideas and new directions in which to pursue them.

MS: It is often said of Foucault that his analysis of the history of man and human institutions has the merit of having a destabilizing effect on the current. Meaning that we maybe can learn from Foucaults work how to think differently than we do about stuff we take for granted in todays society. Would you renounce it if someone where to emphasize that some of your own works about the past (for instance Mad Travelers) can have a similar radical effect on todays thinking? H: Does destabilize mean more than challenge old assumptions and suggest new ideas? Of course I hope some of my work has done and will do that. No renunciation here!
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MS: A frequent critique of Foucault is that his analysis sometimes leaves out human agency. Here I think your works could be thought of as an improvement on that, or at least an addition maybe. If you could allow me to apply this on a rather common concern often associated with liberal thinking and humanistic critique of modern day biomedicine and psychiatry which tends to focus on the fact that mental categories leads people to think of themselves in terms of diagnosis and objects rather than responsible persons with a free will that could be held morally responsible and so on. But I think is this here really accounted for, I wonder if these critiques may be underestimating peoples ability to almost elbow their place and identity under changing circumstances and that these critiques operate with to simplistic theories of how people and for instance medical diagnosis intervene. As you write in your book on multiple personality disorders Rewriting the Soul, you say that sometimes people take the matter into their own hands. So, would you agree that your thinking that suggest that people cant be used just as passive victims but as active agents, can be used as an argument against this worry? H: Well, I dont know if it is an argument. I think theres a lot of real worries about the extent to which diagnosis forces a way to be person on an individual, but its always an interaction. And, I am in some odd way still a kind of old-fashioned this means sort of 1950s existentialist. That is, I think there is an enormous amount of human choice. And I believe that even in the case of many mental illnesses, although the illness may well have a strictly biological/biochemical foundation, the actual manifestations are much more like a kind of choice of how to work out ones unhappiness. I have a colleague in Toronto, Edward Shorter, who has received a lot of criticism for accounts he has given of specifically womens mental illnesses. I mean 19th century phenomena such as neurasthenia and hysteria, down through various kinds of illnesses that have arisen much more recently, such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He suggests that all these ailments use the same symptom pool, but they choose from the symptom pool in different ways. I think thats not an inaccurate way of describing the phenomena. It points towards the complicated way in which there can be, at a time and place, a culturally set agenda. Individuals somehow choose from a sort of menu of ways to be ill. It is not a question of blaming people for their illness, but of saying that given that they do have a fundamental disturbance, its man infestation is more culturally determined than a strictly medical model would allow. I think theres lot of individuality there. But, remember Foucault always inveighed against the pictures of power exercised down. Power is also something that emanates up. Its the subjects who choose the specific ways in which they will

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be subjects. In being open to an approach such as Shorters, I am once again imitating Foucault, and then internalizing one of his ways of thinking.

Science Wars MS: In the seemingly never ending debate between realists and social constructivist you seem to say that it doesnt really matter who is right. And that the question of whether something is a natural phenomena or man-made phenomena is in a sense fruitless? This is the position you bring to the often heated intellectual debate called the Science Wars. Could you perhaps shortly describe your project in your influential book The Social Construction of What? H: This question really does misrepresent me! I very seldom think it doesnt really matter who is right. The title of the book is The Social Construction of What? The emphasis implies that you had better be clear about what is said to be socially constructed. I think a lot of the debate is hopelessly confused. The core book I intended to write is the first four chapters the American publishers wanted more chapters and I obliged, but the German translation, Wie heisst Social Konstruction? has just the original four chapters. In the third one I distinguished three sticking points which I said were distinct, difficult, and recognizable throughout the history of philosophy. We may never fully settle which is the right place to lodge ones opinions with respect to these sticking points. This is because they represent fundamentally different attitudes to the world and our place in it. It is not because it doesnt really matter who is right. What I was trying to do in the book was to distinguish real, hard problems from confusions. And also to make clear that the very expression social construction has become useless. Many people say But your books about multiple personality and transient mental illnesses are social constructivist in spirit! Say so if you want, but I hope I never spoke of social construction in either book I tried to be precise and to address particular historical situations and conjunctures. No question is ever clarified by saying something is a social construction, and many debates become confused as soon as that phrase is introduced. MS: You have this funny comment, I think it is in The Social construction of What?, you compare yourself to the United Nations in the so called science wars. I was wondering if this position could imply to your whole project, you seem to be accepted both by the natural scientist and the realist on the one hand and followers of social constructions on the other hand. If you
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look at the list of the former winners of the Holberg price: Julia Kristeva, Jrgen Habermas, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Ronald Dworkin, Fredric Jameson, both Kristeva and Jameson stirred up the old science wars-debate. Your old colleague from College de France, Jon Elster, called Kristeva a French charlatan. And Eisenstadt was said to belong to the B-team of political scientist by the same man, and even a philosopher as widely recognized as Habermas drew some criticism and disagreement in Norwegian papers.5 But as far as I can see your candidature has not caused any objections from any groups, so you seem to be accepted in both camps, if we could use C. P. Snows old distinction. So, I was wondering: Is this a position that you agree with and are you happy with it, or would you like to be considered a more controversial figure in todays academic world? H: Its a matter of indifference. I do what I do. And, I dont care whether Im controversial or not. What is true is that I am careful. To take an example: (this is just a parable) When I was doing and had finished the Rewriting the Soul-stuff there was a tremendous amount of litigation, coming into to being on the false memory syndrome. People were found guilty of horrible things on the basis of memories of people 15 years before, which had been repressed. Other people said these were all made up there were a lot of legal cases, and a lot of people would call me up, and they would say: Would you like to be an expert witness? And they would talk to me for ten minutes and theyd say no matter which side they were on, they would say: No, sorry, we cant use you. I couldve been very rich now if Ive had been an expert witness. And, I always said: Well, if you think its complicated and you want a simple story to tell the jury, and I never tell

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On Hacking as an intellectual

MS: In one of your recent books, Scientific Reason, you insist on being called a philosopher and not historian of science, yet a lot of your work one normally would associate with historians such as your interest for particular cases, your almost obsession with dating things, your love for empirical data and sometimes also your resentment toward carrying out general sweeping theories about your findings. So, I was wondering: why do you insist on being called a philosopher and not a historian?

Runar Dving (Morgenbladet, 28.10.05), Makten i den sterkestes argument.

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H: Because Im not an historian. I dont have the skills of an historian. What I do, is that I use the past. I make my philosophy by making use of the past. I dont think that in French at any rate Michel Foucault was never called an historian; hes called a philosopher. Analytic philosophers may bark at that, I dont care. So, certainly in French I would be called a philosoper. My chair was called philosophy in history of scientific concepts that was a simply political move of my handlers; it had nothing to do with me. I dont mind that, its just fine, but Im certainly very interested in the way present concept come into being. But I dont regard myself as an historian, now there are historians that seem to me to be more philosophical than others. The person who is coming up to give the oration at the banquet Wednesday night (Lorraine Daston) would never dream of herself to be called a philosopher. But she got in my opinion many good philosophical intuitions, which most historians dont. Most historians dont have any philosophical sensibility at all. Some do, like Daston or Peter Galison or historians of science, and I think Im a philosopher who has historical sensibilities, but Im not an historian. MS: You put it beautifully when you stated that Im the philosopher of the particular case. I read the interview you gave with the Holberg Price. You said something interesting and striking, you said: I tend to get involved at local rather than general levels. It was an answer to a question on what you thought of current societal research. Could this statement also be a possible testimony to you as a thinker? That you sometimes avoid more societal, ideological or political ground theories, at the same time as I understand youve been involved in local politics and engaged yourself in humanitarian issues.

H: To some extent, not as much as I feel I ought to have done. But, yes. Look, I feel like I have a lot of interesting things to say about particulars, and that a awful lot of general statements may be ideologically moving for a moment but they dont go anywhere. All that stuff on probability is making very general claims on how our worldview has changed. Its just as much a philosophy about worldviews as something that starts from the top, and I always start from the bottom up. I always ask my students the statement that they must hate in me most is give me an example, because it seems to me that so often people dont give examples. Thats actually the point of the title: The social construction of what? What are you talking about? And, it turns out that very different things are being said as soon as you focus on a particular example. MS: You referred earlier to your position as dynamical nominalism. H: That was a cute phrase which occurred to me thirty years ago or something, but its interesting. I discovered much later that at about the same time Michel Foucault speaks of what

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he calls a historical nominalism. His actually talking about a famous book about homosexuality (very well known book), he says its a great book etc., but that al those people that think that there is such a thing as homosexuality, as opposed to same sex behavior, really needs to undertake a serious historical nominalism. And so, I used dynamical nominalism, I perfectly well could have said historical, except I think I would emphasis the dynamic, the way of a sort of internal dynamic of the way in which the naming interacts with what is named. But then, a friend suggested to me, that you could just as well call it dialectical realism as opposed to dynamic nominalism, so I said OK. MS: Finally I think I do have to fulfill the patriotic deed of asking you something that is really more about Norway than about yourself. Well, maybe not. In one of your latest articles on autism How we have been learning to talk about autism: A role for stories (2009) you funnily enough discuss two of the works of the Norwegian fiction-writer Karin Fossum. You make the on-thepoint remark that she always seem to include one mental case in her books, what you seem to judge are rather good books within the crime-genre. Do you want to say something, hopefully complimentary, about your knowledge with Scandinavian crime-literature to please the national-

pride of the Norwegian readers?

H: Everybody knows that the genre of Scandinavian crime fiction (at least that much of it translated into English) is wonderful to read. It is as if Kurt Wallender opened a tap. What is surprising is that it is so clearly a Nordic genre. Fossum is one of the best. Could one write a Canadian pastiche set in another northern clime? (I have thought of trying!) I do not think so. But it is wearing. There is an alleged ailment called SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, viz, being severely (but non-medically, see above) depressed because of lack of light. All the characters in this genre seem to suffer from NSAD, non-seasonal affective disorder, 12 months in 12. But the recent raging success, Stieg Larssons The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, breaks from the mold. Yes, there is the usual cast of depressive Nordics. But there are some really happy people. And what makes the book sell around the world must be the brilliant idea of inserting a Superhero Wonder-woman into an otherwise run-of-the-mill Scandinavian thriller. We all love Salander, and want more of her! The second volume of the trilogy is now out in English, and we will soon be reading it.

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