Ian Hacking and entity realism

A 20th and 21st century Canadian philosopher who has not made as large a dent in the fields of philosophy of science and, more generally, of epistemology as he may reasonably have hoped: Ian Hacking died a little more than a year ago, in May 2023, when his heart failed him at the age of 87 at a retirement home in Toronto.

Hacking is best remembered as the foremost advocate in the philosophy of science of the view known as "entity realism". This is related to our discussion of the Vienna Circle in recent posts. Consider that in the philosophy of science, in the heyday of the VC and in our own time as well, one central question is "do we need to explain the predictive success of the best scientific theories? and, if we do, is their approximate truth an accurate non-circular explanation?"

Scientific realism says "yes we do and yes it is." A theory about electrons may be right because electrons are real, and it may be successfully predictive because it is right.

Ernst Mach, whom we discussed along with the Vienna Circle, might have scoffed. "To say that electrons are real is precisely to say that our predictions based on models that posit them have proven valuable in predicting and controlling events. To say one is not to explain the other. It is just to re-word the other." That is a rough paraphrase, but I am not Mach-ing this up.

Anyway, Hacking (his image is above) offered an "entity realism". This has also been called "selective realism". It was not as full-bore as the scientific realism of (in my understanding anyway) Hilary Putnam. But Hacking agreed with the full-bore scientific realist that entities are real and statements about them are true because they are real and we know at least approximate things about these entities. But there is much else of which a full-bore realist might say the same, where Hacking would not. Biological species boundaries, for are not entities. Yet with these there is the same conflict between the realist and the pragmatist (with a "conventionalist" in the mix we might make the Machian pragmatist out to be at the center of this spectrum).

Hacking believed that entities are real, in a sense behind their theoretic utility. But he did not believe that laws or such non-entity postulations as species boundaries, are real, or "factive" as philosophers-of-science sometimes put it. In nature, likewise, there are no purely Newtonian gravitational systems or purely electromagnetic systems. Each is a mathematical idealization, not a fact.

On our spectrum, this realism-for-entities combined with anti-realism-for-laws is somewhere between Putnam and Mach.

I was planning on saying a whole lot more, especially regarding Hacking's views on the philosophical understanding of probability. But I think I will leave that for another day.

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