Ian Hacking (1999), Harvard University Press (cloth ISBN 9780674812000, 261 pp.; paperback ISBN 9780674004122, 15 November 2000) — DOI-10.2307/j.ctv1bzfp1z
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out the record’s coverage of social ontology under the topic ADR-017 added; ADR-017 names Hacking among the authors whose absence showed the gap.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read and no
NOTE is filed. What follows is what the bibliographic records show.
Contents (titles and pages from the Crossref chapter records; the records cut the titles of the fourth and fifth chapters after the colon, and the subtitles are not supplied here):
- Preface (vii–x)
- 1 Why Ask What? (1–34)
- 2 Too Many Metaphors (35–62)
- 3 What About the Natural Sciences? (63–99)
- 4 Madness: … (100–124)
- 5 Kind-making: … (125–162)
- 6 Weapons Research (163–185)
- 7 Rocks (186–206)
- 8 The End of Captain Cook (207–226)
- Notes, works cited, index (227–261)
Where it would sit. The title’s question is the one the record’s social-construction filings answer in different ways: Haslanger (LIT-480) constructs gender and race as social positions, Ásta (LIT-491) as conferred statuses, and Ritchie (LIT-486) treats social kinds as nodes in social structures. Ritchie cites a different Hacking work (“The Looping Effects of Human Kinds”, 1995) for kinds that change the people they classify; whether chapter 5 develops that idea is to be checked. The SEP entry on natural kinds (LIT-244, NOTE-217) records Hacking’s later advice to delete talk of natural kinds; that, too, is a different work. Berger & Luckmann (LIT-474), filed unread beside this, is the earlier book with “social construction” in its title.
Topic. social-ontology is primary. philosophy-of-science holds its
chapters on the natural sciences, weapons research and rocks, and
metaphysics holds the realism question those chapters raise.
No instruction for machine-learning practice appears in what was seen, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.
What a reading should check.
- What distinctions chapter 1 draws among construction claims, and whether they sort Haslanger’s and Ásta’s accounts.
- Whether chapter 5’s “kind-making” is the looping-kinds account Ritchie cites from 1995, and how it relates to Ritchie’s social kinds as nodes.
- Whether the book engages Berger & Luckmann.