Continuing Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What, ch. 1 & 2 (1999); Peter Berger's “Religion and World Construction," which is ch. 1 of The Sacred Canopy (1967). We break down the steps to a social construction argument according to Hacking; since not all thinkers take all the steps, how many steps are involved provides a nice classification scheme for these Continue Reading …
Ep. 227: What Is Social Construction? (Hacking, Berger) (Part One)
On Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What, ch 1 & 2 (1999); Peter Berger's “Religion and World Construction," i.e., the beginning of The Sacred Canopy (1967), and Ron Mallon's “Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction” (2008, rev. 2019) from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Guest Coleman Hughes from the Dilemma podcast joins us to survey the ways and Continue Reading …
Ep. 227: What Is Social Construction? (Hacking, Berger) (Citizen Edition)
On Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What, ch. 1 & 2 (1999); Peter Berger's “Religion and World Construction," i.e., the beginning of The Sacred Canopy (1967), and Ron Mallon's “Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction” (2008, rev. 2019) from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Guest Coleman Hughes from the Dilemma podcast joins us to survey the ways and Continue Reading …
Science, Technology, and Society XIV: Ian Hacking
This post in the fourteenth and last in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. When someone speaks of the social construction of X, you have to ask, X = what? Ian Hacking (1936 – ) is a Canadian philosopher, historian of Continue Reading …
Ian Hacking on Probability & Inference
The most recent brough-ha-ha from one of Mark's posts seems to center on rationality and philosophy, but underlying all the stuff in the "new rationality" is understanding the process of updating our current knowledge with new information through Bayes Theorem (LW calls the process belief updating or bayesian updating). Bayes Theorem is both very useful and very interesting Continue Reading …