Daniel Little — Ian Hacking on chance as worldview

Ian Hacking was one of the more innovative and adventurous philosophers to take up the philosophy of science as their field of inquiry. The Taming of Chance (1990) is a genuinely fascinating treatment of the subject of the emergence of the idea of populations of events rather than discrete individuals. Together with The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (1975; 2nd ed. 2006), the two books represent a very original contribution to an important aspect of modern ways of thinking: the ways in which the human sciences and the public came to think differently about the nature of social and biological reality.

Hacking's contributions to the history of statistical and probabilistic thinking are particularly valuable for the light they shed light on a crucial moment during which fundamental change in the largest gauge intellectual framework took place -- the shift away from deterministic causation to the idea that phenomena present themselves with a distribution of characteristics.

Understanding Society
Ian Hacking on chance as worldview
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan at Dearborn

This is a big deal because at key transition points in history the character of human thinking shifted radically, which led to a new way of seeing the world and therefore a new cultural worldview as it spread. We see this today in the digital divide that separates generations that grew in an analog world and the generations now growing up in a digital world.