Ian Hacking: entre ontologia e a probabilidade

O Hacking é um dos meus filósofos contemporâneos favoritos. Não é apenas o prêmio que o torna interessante:


The Holberg International Memorial Prize for 2009 for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology is awarded to Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and Collège de France Ian Hacking.

Citation from the Holberg Prize Academic Committee:

"Ian Hacking is a preeminent philosopher and historian of the sciences. His combination of rigorous philosophical and historical analysis has profoundly altered our understanding of the ways in which key concepts emerge through scientific practices and in specific social and institutional contexts. His work lays bare the normative and social implications of the natural and the social sciences."

Entre seus assuntos, a ontologia histórica e a lógica da inferência estatística são especialmente interessantes. A referência do prêmio ao segundo:

"In The Logic of Statistical Inference (1965), Hacking critically appraises the use of probability theory in contemporary statistics. The Emergence of Probability (1975) makes clear how the idea of probability first took shape in the seventeenth century, in the work of thinkers such as Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. He pursues the story into the nineteenth century in The Taming of Chance (1990), where he shows how the "avalanche of printed numbers" that occurred as states began to collect and publish statistics, led scientists to use probabilistic concepts to understand social life. No scholar has made a more substantial contribution to our comprehension of the emergence of probability as a fundamental concept in both theory and practice in the modern world."