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Sociology and Hacking’s Trousers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Warren Schmaus
Warren Schmaus*
Affiliation:
Illinois Institute of Technology
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Extract

For Hacking, the word “real” is one of J.L. Austin's trouser-words, taking its meaning from its negative uses in much the same way as the admittedly sexist expression “wear the trousers”. In Representing and Intervening, Hacking proposes that at least some scientific realists can be interpreted as using the word “real” in this way. The word “real” is also substantive-hungry, he adds. Thus when a philosopher states that a type of entity is not real we need to know just what is being denied. The causal entity realist, for example, holds that the entities scientists postulate in their theories can be regarded as real if they have causal powers that can be manipulated to create observable and repeatable effects. Thus the causalist offers sociology a possible way to command respect: if social science entities could be manipulated, the social sciences would then be on a par with physics.

Type
Part V. Problems in Special Sciences
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 167 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Ian Hacking for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay and for sending me offprints of some of his articles. Of course, I accept full responsibility for any remaining errors of interpretation.

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