This book is an extraordinarily well-written introduction to the philosophy of science. However, it is far from a mere introduction. Hacking's take on the realism/antirealism debate, and observable/unobservable distinction, is far from being simply expository. But perhaps most importantly, his philosophy of experiment demonstrates his impressive ability to clearly articulate the nature of empirical scientific inquiry as he sees it. I recommend the book to philosophers of science, analytic philosophers in general, and those seeking a lucid introduction to the philosophy of science.

I was an avid fan of Feyerabend when I came across a curious little article by a certain Ian Hacking in a Feyerabend reader. This particular article was startling in its down-to-earth approach to the philosophy of science. It's insistent mantra mirrored that of my supervisor's, "always go back to the experiment".

That article turned out to be from a pivotal chapter of Representing and Intervening, a lovely little book that I have grown to love. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this book revolutionised the philosophy of science by turning on its head the role of theory and experimentation (experimentation is king whereas I am a lowly theoretical biophysicst!).

The question that dominates the second half of the book, by far the better half, is when does a entity in science become a real entity. The answer, according to Hacking is "if you can spray it then its real." In one fell swoop, Hacking side-steps thorny and abtruse concepts that have plagued the philosophy of science such as falsification, induction and paradigms. Hacking re-interprets historical episodes and demonstrates how the final acceptance of a theory was its experimental reliability, not just in single instances, but in a diverse range of applications. The power of his examples is that they are drawn from contemporary experiments - something that not many philosophers of science actually do.

As a companion to the book, I really recommend Bruno Latour's "Laboratory Life". Latour complements Hacking by showing just exactly how a single scientific entity changes shape as the experimental techniques which intersect it are expanded and improved upon.

Another beautiful quality of the book is the lucid prose. Hacking shows how philosophers don't need to write in a profound style to convey profound thoughts.

This book awakens the interest about practice in natural science. So Hacking stresses the singificance of experimentation and criticizes the bias for theory in philosophy of science. Very insightful and challenging trial for the new direction for philosophy of science.

This is a great book. Hacking describes the development of probability and statistics from the Renaissance to David Hume. His central questions are: What were Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Jacques Bernoulli, and all the others really doing? What problems were they trying to solve? What limitations were they working under? How did all this fit into other intellectual and mathematical problems of the day? How did all this affect the subsequent development of probability and statistics? Some of this clears up minor details that I had never grasped before, such as what was the problem with two dice that Pascal solved for the Chevalier de Mere. More important is the description of the intellectual implications of the development of modern probability and statistics. I had not known that the very name "probability" grew out of a profound religious and intellectual argument between the Jansenist Pascal and the Jesuits.

The book is full of historical gems. For example, the Dutch and English governments in the seventeenth century became infatuated with annuities as a way to finance theor expenses, especially wars. Most of the schemes were actuarially unsound. The early statisticians devoted a lot of energy to this problem and this led to major advances. Unfortunately the governments were not always pleased to be told they had no clothes. It all sounds terribly up to date.

In summary, this book covers material that is important not only in a histroical context but also for its relvance to many contemporary issues. It is well written and concise. If you want to know what the early probabilists were thinking about and how that affected the way we all think about uncertainty today, this is the book for you.

The best thing about this book is that it teachs basic probability theory while keeping the reader constantly aware of the on-going debate regarding what it means to talk in terms of probabilities, and of how that debate has shaped the development of probability theory. If you are a student taking a course in probability and statistics who would like to genuinely understand the conceptual basis of all those formulas they are teaching you, I suggest you read this book.

Some readers will be disappointed by this book. Since the book concentrates on the conceptual basis of probability and inductive logic, it does not give the reader enough technical tools to really do much applied mathematics. On the other hand, by the time Hacking gets around to discussing what students of philosophy will likely view as the big philosophical pay-off of probability theory (i.e. Bayesian and frequentist contributions to the problem of justifying induction) he devotes to them a mere 20 pages of not terribly deep discussion.

I would HIGHLY recommend this book for anyone (including business men) who must make decisions with incomplete information and under uncertainty. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of statistics, it focuses on how to think about risky propositions.

I bought this book while working on a particular problem in machine learning, at a point where I had started realizing that I was losing clarity on my definition of probability. I was using the mechanics, but didn't clearly understand why the use was valid. This seemed an odd and embarrassing circumstance at the time, how could I not understand what "probability" means? As it turns out this confusion is one shared broadly in history of science, and in current applications of statistical mechanics.

Prof Hacking's writing is clear and entertaining, clearly aimed at engaging the reading audience.

Like many people might, I looked at the title of this one and fell in love. "Social construction of what?" I'm in, I said to myself, for a great 'take em down' kind of book a la Dawkins and Sokal and, honestly, I love those kind of books. Well, I used to; untill Hacking took all the fun out!!

Why do I say that? Because I've been fooled all these years by gross caricaturizations of social constructionism (which, as were told, ALWAYS must be synonymous with relativism). This book, the only neutral one I've seen, is devoted to explaining, I think, to both sides of the debate (if you want to call it that!) that there is much more middle ground than is realized. Like most answers to most questions, the most likely answer to "Are you a social constructivist?" should be "It depends on the circumstance".

Hacking, a philosopher of science, goes through different meanings of social construction: on the less contreversial side, we have laws and I.Q. Not many will say these aren't real in the sense that they work, but besides that they don't really exist. You can't hold them, directly observe them; they are social tools. In the middle, you have mental disorders and averages. Like the others, they don't exist outside of our classification of them. (one might make a case for mental retardiation, but ask five psychiatrists what "schizophrenia" is and you will get five different answers). The most contreversial, of course, are things like gender and physical matter. Both of these things are observable, thus, it is hard t osee how social construction can change anything with them. Hacking calmly explains how some people suggest you can.

Anyhow, Hackings point is that most of us, however small a degree, are social constructionists about something; we just didn't know it. For my part, on Hackings three part quiz (try it, you'll like it!) I scored a 4-5-1. I never would've realized that by reading more of the polarized books about the science wars and the straw-men therein. Makes me woner...Are the science wars social constructs?....

In the neverending battle to define "what is real" for each other, to persuade each other of what is good, bad, and important, one disturbing trend in academia is to jump on the bandwagon of things considered "socially constructed." The banner of social construction has become a lightning rod of sorts for all sorts of bizarre things that represent what the author refers to in terms of "rage against reason." X was socially constructed, and therefore is unreal, and even bad, and should be modified or replaced by Y.

Emotions, knowledge, the mind, the economy, the deficit, gender, mental illness, even facts and reality, all have been subjected to literary claims that they are "socially constructed."

Hacking provides an interesting perspective on this whole trend by de-emphasizing the social aspect and focusing on the construction aspect. He views this simply as a way of arguing against the inevitability of something. For example, arguing about 'social construction' of our understanding of quarks in physics, part of the standard model, the question becomes whether an alternate equally successful science could have arisen that had no such concept as a quark. Hacking then struggles with what a successful science means, and how we would recognize it. There are many examples that follow this pattern, each discussed in terms of whether X was inevitable, and thus how else it could have been constructed in our minds and in culture.

Hacking goes as far as an offhanded treatment of nominalism and essentialism relevant to this inevitability question (essential qualities are those that are seen as inevitable). He breaks down difficult questions into relatively simple ones using this same kind of straightforward procedure. In analyzing the social construction of X for many examples, he looks for those elements of X that were inevitable, and those that serve "extra-theoretical" purposes and could have been constructed differently.

One particularly unique aspect of hacking's work here, the prototype of social constructionism here is not the sociology of science in general. He uses Pickering, LaTour, and Woolgar as his prime examples, rather than folks like Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, who are often considered in the same category. Hacking considers them distinct for his purposes, and this reveals some interesting distinctions.

What I liked best about this book is that while it is carefully done, there is an offhanded air about the points Hacking makes. He makes some very difficult analyses seem very easy by pulling particularly useful examples from the literature. He navigates a lot of difficult philosophy by asking deceptively simple questions, like "what is the point ?" rather than "what is the meaning ?"

There are some interesting sweeping gestures here like claiming that social construction can simply by thought of as an argument against the inevitability of X, and then analyzed for how committed the author is to claiming X is bad and overturning X. Another interesting example is Hacking's description of essentialism as simply a way of talking about inevitability.

This book is somewhat disappointing if you're looking for simple answers to each of the questions posed, "is X socially constructed or not ?" However, it provides an extremely helpful way of looking at each case and trying to decide whether a 'social construction' critique actually has any value, or whether it just gives the history of the topic. Perhaps most useful is Hacking's "3 sticking points" with which to address the construction of a concept: contingency, nominalism, and stability.

This is a thinking person's book, but not nearly as incomprehensible to the layman as most works of modern philosophy, and much easier to read and more helpful than most of the "social construction" literature itself.

I'd go as far as to say that in many cases, we could replace the "social construction of X" arguments with Hacking's style of analysis about inevitability and the 3 sticking points, and come up with a more enlightening answer about the reality of the X in question.

If there is any flaw that I found here it is that I didn't think there was enough detail provided on any one topic to resolve the questions asked, they are pretty much all examples, and more questions are raised than answered. That can get maddening when you are just getting interested in the topic.

This book is terrific. Humane, balanced, measured observations of the battle between those who see science as socially constructed and those who hew to a more naive realism (most scientists, like myself), written by a self-professed non-combatant. The views expressed are insightful, sophisticated and very informative for those not familiar with this kind of internecine warfare. Some of the chapters were written at other times and do not fit completely, but there is enough here to satisfy anyone wanting to know what the fuss is all about and how it might be understood. A really wonderful book that deserves a wide readership.

This book raises a lot of questions. The issue Hacking takes on is fascinating: multiple personality disoder and its philosophical implications. Hacking is a lot more down-to-earth and clear as a writer than most other philosophers, making this book much easier to read than anything I remember reading in philosophy class in college.

Hacking analyzes both MPD and the MPD movement. This is really interesting and makes me, the reader, think that there is a fascinating story to be told here: the story of how the movement came into being and has changed over time. Hacking gets into that, but then he backs off from it, and says he has scrupulously limited himself to matters of public record. No fair! this frustrated reader wants to say. It's like someone saying...I know things you don't....and not sharing.

There are a few flaws with this book that mean Hacking's conclusions should not be accepted uncritically:

1. Errors of fact. Hacking is sloppy here, or he has one of the worst editors of all time. I'll cite one of the simplest. In the hardback version I read, Jennifer Freyd's name is misspelled throughout. She is referred to as "Jenifer". Maybe this has been corrected since then. But Hacking has the temerity to evaluate the quality of "Jenifer's" writing - when he can't spell her name right. Excuse me??

2. Difficult to follow in some chapters. I found the chapters on the history of memory to be poorly organized, so that I lost the thread of what Hacking was saying. This is my failure as a reader, perhaps. But if anyone else tries to plow through that part of the book and can't make it, you are not alone.

3. Questionable claim of impartiality: Hacking presents himself as impartial, favoring neither the FMSF nor the trauma therapists. In actual fact, he is either sloppy, or very close to an FMSF apologist. This can be seen in his unwise choice of source materials. He consistently ignores the more responsible therapists and books.

I believe one (or more) of the following possibilities is true:

- Hacking is an FMSF advocate pretending to be impartial
- Hacking really tries to be impartial here, but did a poor job researching his subject and presents his conclusions too confidently.
- This book suffers from the ill effects of poor editing

But Hacking does a couple of great things:

- He thinks for himself. For example, he asks why so many alters are men, or little children, or homosexual. Then he talks about the implications of this. Fascinating questions!

- He discredits the concept of a core self, pristine, pure, untouched by culture. Thank you, Dr. Hacking. It's about time someone did.

- He eschews jargon and buzzwords, in favor of his own thoughts and phrasing. This is not common in an author writing about psychology, and is welcome.

I also think that, unfortunately, there were two or more books here that got fused. One of these books would have been MPD, the modern movement, and what it says about human consciousness. That would have been fascinating.

The other book would have been about the science and politics of memory, including Hacking's term, memoro-politics. That could be interesting too, but only if Hacking included the work of more responsible therapists. To me, these two separate discussions didn't fit together well.