Ian Hacking

And even if you know that you are the one who came up with the numbers for the math.

There's a great book called The Teaming of Chance by Ian Hacking, which kind of goes through, he has a bunch of books on this, on like the history of statistics and probability.

And he has a, there's also Making Up People, which is sort of the like, how categorization of social behaviors and all that comes to shape actual subjects and all this stuff.

But it's a great...

Yeah, that's true.

He actually critiques Ian Hacking because he's like, yeah, we're close.

Where he's like, Ian Hacking describes his method as genealogy of the present.

And he's like, yes, we need to do that and then also project it to the future.

So it's like you not only give, here's the antecedent consequences of history and you weave it together, but you also do something.

But that just misses the point is that people, and the same with schizophrenia, people are having negative consequences because of the classification and we need to take that seriously you know and i think think about why is that what's going on there and that's again i that's not to say that people aren't suffering or need help i'm not i don't you know that i completely recognize the very great suffering pain and difficulty people are experiencing and i'm not calling for these things to be abolished or anything like that but i am saying we need to be very mindful and very very aware of And conversations about validity alone sort of miss the point, you know? And so we need to think about how the way we classify people changes.

And the great person who wrote on this was obviously Ian Hacking, who passed away a couple of years ago.

And when the last DSM came out, he did a wonderful...

He did a book review of DSM-5.

Uh, before that, nobody ever said that.

Ian Hacking, who is a, uh-- who wrote a history of probability theory, searched th-through world literature for any reference to a probability and could find none anywhere before sixteen hundred.

So there was an intellectual leap that occurred in the seventeenth century, uh, and it became, uh, very, um, fashionable [laughs] to talk in the terms of probabilities.

It spread throughout the world, the idea of quoting probabilities.

No, what I, uh, what, uh, uh, apparently she meant is trustworthy, okay? That's a very important quality in a person, I suppose, right? So if something is probable, you mean that you can trust it, okay? And so probability means trustworthiness.

And so, uh, the pr-- uh, you can see how they moved from that definition of probability to the, uh, current definition.

Um, but Ian Hacking, being a good historian, uh, thought, you know, someone must have had some concept of probability going before, uh, even if they didn't quote it as a number the way-- It must have been in their head or in their idea.

So he searched through world literature to try to find some use of the term that, uh, preceded the 1600s, and he concluded that there were probably a number of people who had the idea, but they didn't publish it, [laughs] and it never became part of the established, um, um, uh, literature.

They included Elizabeth Anscombe and Bernard Williams, among others.

And also, importantly to me, Ian Hacking, who had a more historical background approach to philosophy.

He was more interested in, as it were, the kind of cultural context in which philosophical ideas developed.

And I think I found that very influential and also attractive.