One of the books I read on vacation was Historical Ontology by Ian Hacking, who I met once or twice when I was a grad student at U of T. (Neither of us understood what the other was up to, but that’s another story.)
While Hacking doesn’t do the philosophy of computing, he does philosophy of ideas, especially mathematical and scientific ideas. Historical ontology (or “dynamic nominalism”) is the name for his style of reasoning that he acknowledges is from Foucault.
His work is important to the philosophy of computing in a number of ways. First, he describes a style of historical analysis that we need to practice on the concepts of computing. It is looking at thick concepts and their instruments. Second, his historical ontology is the critical mirror to the simulation view of computing. The simulation view is that you understand by simulating objects or modelling virtually. Object oriented programming is a deeper version of this – programming is the defining of objects and behaviours, a description of a possible world – historical ontology is the analysis of such possible worlds. Object making vs object understanding.
Thus what he says about how we invent things (or construct them) has an explicit application to computing. In some science cases he argues that we invent physical things; for example when we create a new element that was potentially there, but doesn’t exist in nature. He pushes this further to a paradoxical view to the effect that as we invent (or develop) the concepts for things we, in effect, bring them into existence (as something to be thought about.)
Some quotes and notes,
Historical ontology is about the ways in which the possibilities for choice, and for being, arise in history. It is not to be practiced in terms of grand abstractions, but in terms of the explicit formations in which we can constitute ourselves, formations whose trajectories can be ploltted as clearly as those of trauma or child development, or, at one remove, that can be traced more obscurely by larger organizing concepts such as objectivity or even facts themselves. Historical ontology is not so much about the formation of character as about the space of possibilities for character formation that surround a person, and create the potentials for “individual experience.” (p. 23)
At its boldest, historical ontology would show how to understand, act out, and resolve present problems, even when in so doing it generated new ones. At its more modest it is conceptual analysis, analyzing our concepts, but not in the timeless way … of philosophical analysis. (p. 24-25)
The idea is to look historically at the evolution of the concepts we use (especially the “thick” ones) to understand how to act, the world and things. To understand things and the being of things we need to understand the genesis of the concepts we use to invent them. In my mind this runs the danger (that he dismisses as name calling on page 63) of priviledging genetic arguments (a thing is what it came from) beyond their usefulness. Genetic arguments are awfully close to arguments from authority and association. Just because, for example, the internet may have been developed as a military communication strategy doesn’t mean that it is a hopelessly belligerant technology. In fact, those who start by telling us that the internet started as a military project (besides being wrong) miss what it is about or how it works in their attempt to expose some hidden secret. Hacking may be too subtle or fair minded to fall for overwrought genetic arguments, but by arguing for historical ontology he leaves us with the impression that looking at the evolution of concepts is all there is left for philosophers.
The problem is that Hacking’s “history” is itself another concept that can be reverse engineered. Depending on how you do history you can get different results when studying the “evolution” of a concept. Evolution itself is a contested and overused concept. The one person who seems to be able to use the history of history on ideas is Vico. His point is exactly how the history of something will look different depending on what age you are in.
Hacking, following Foucault, believes that any discussion should reveal ethics, power, and knowledge. It is easy to see the knowledge and how historical ontology helps understanding, but Hacking doesn’t make clear how this might be an ethical practice beyond the ways in which understanding helps make choices or reveals choices for what they are. I think he is right to remind us of the importance of power and ethics, but suspect he does a more thorough job elsewhere.
One think I like about Hacking and this collection of essays is his willingness to paint the history of ideas in broad strokes. He can go from Kant to himself in a paragraph. Such historical reach is the point of historical ontology and he does it well, even if he overuses “I”, weaving himself into the story in a way that is distracting.
It (his way of doing philosophy) is historicist. It is not philosophy as conversation. It is philosophy as hard work. Or to use understatement, it is less talking than taking a look. (p.71)
To return to looking (at the thing itself?) – he, like Gadamer, repeatedly suggests we need to return to looking at the phenomena we wish to study. By that I don’t suppose he means actually looking with your eyes, but a looking away from secondary literature and chatter and return to the object of study. (Is it fair to mention that if he knew the history of philosophy as dialogue he might remember that dialogue and conversation have been set across from “hard work” before and in ways that don’t reflect well on philosophical hard work.)
Hacking was trained in analytical philosophy but, like Rorty and others, has come think of his work in a continental tradition going back to Kant. “Where Kant had found the conditions of possible experience in the structure of the human mind, Foucault does it with historical, and hence transient, conditions for possible discourse.” (p. 79) In a way he is doing historicist analysis – analyzing words and concepts in light of their history of use. This is what he says about analysis,
Philosophical analysis is the analysis of concepts. Concepts are words in their sites. Sites include sentences, uttered or transcribed, always in a larger site of neighborhood, institution, authority, language. If one took seriously the project of philosophical analysis, one would require a history of the words in their sites in order to comprehend what the concept was. But isn’t “analysis” a breaking down, a decomposition into smaller parts, atoms? Not entirely; for example, “analysis” in mathematics denotes the differential and integral calculus, among other things. Atomism is one kind of analysis … (p. 68)
One can see how search and concording tools can be helpful for finding and studying the linguistic sites of words/concepts. Hacking has “hacked” his own intersection between analytical and continental philosophy. Good for him.
Two reviews of the book can be found at, Ali Khalidi, Book Reviews and Historical Ontology.
Bibliographic Reference: Ian Hacking Historical Ontology Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002.