Hacking, "Kind-Making: The Case Of Child Abuse" (1999)

The group began with questions.

[1] What is the history about? Concepts or practices?

[2] What is at stake in the connection between self-knowledge and concept making?

[3] Could we talk about whether this account provides the possibility for evaluation of these changes? It seems like this mostly a relativistic framework. Can introducing new concepts be understood as progress?

[4] How can we understand Hacking’s notion of medicalization (pp. 135)? What does he take medicalization to involve? Hacking’s prose is incredible. What are the elements of his writing (at the literary level)?

[5] What is the relationship between looping effects and the “motley” rebellion of the sorted?

 

Discussion ensued.

What is Hacking saying/not saying about construction?  Child abuse is real in the sense that one can track a time and place that it arose. Hacking’s account seems close to an STS conception of the real. To say that child abuse is socially constructed is not to deny its reality, but to affirm its reality as a concept.

How do we understand the child abuse/ SRA distinction? Is it that the conceptualization provides the conditions for something to be real?

Maybe the distinction is about whether we think there is an excess of experience or not? Is all experience shaped by discourse. Doesn’t this reduction of everything to discourse preclude the possibility of evaluation?

pp. 29: there Hacking thinks there is an important difference between interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. Humans are interactive whereas rocks are indifferent. There is a tendency in humans to redescribe and reshape their experiences through a conceptual apparatus. Then the relativism question turns on whether there is an pre-conceptual experience independent of our epistemic access to it? How could that kind of experience be relevant to questions of harm or justice?

There seem to be some pretty big social and ethical questions raised by interactive kinds. Could keeping secret the results of social sciences be a plausible way of avoiding them?

pp. 131. Hacking claims to be doing the history of concepts. Is this accurate? How would this approach compare with BOC (which seems more like a history of practices)?

A focus on practice is less easily accused of being linguistically idealistic than a conceptual history be. Could a focus on practices, institutions, give us a more plausible basis for something like political theory (that an account of experience might have been taken to give us)? A good contrast might be Miranda Fricker’s work.