Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking (born 1936-02-18 in Vancouver) is a Canadian philosopher specializing in philosophy of science. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1969, and shifted to Stanford in 1974 to teach in behavioural science. After teaching for several years there and briefly in Germany (1982-1983), he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1983 and a full university professor there in 1991.
He was a member of the "Stanford School" in philosophy of science that included John Dupre, Nancy Cartwright, and Peter Galison. In his later work since 1990, his focus has shifted from the physical sciences to psychology, partly influenced by Michel Foucault as evidenced as early as The Emergence of Probability (1975).
In 2002, he was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities, Canada's most distinguished award for outstanding career achievements. In 2004, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
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- To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good defintions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in commom speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.
- Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?,(1975), P.7
