Riddles of induction – old or new, Hume’s or Goodman’s – pose unanswered challenges to assumptions that experiences logically legitimate expectations or classifications. The challenges apply both to folk beliefs and to scientific ones. In particular, Goodman’s ‘new riddle’ famously confounds efforts to specify how additional experiences confirm the rightness of currently preferred ways of organizing objects, i.e. our favored theories of what kinds there are.1 His riddle serves to emphasize that neither logic nor experience certifies accepted groupings of objects (...) into kinds.2 Hacking strongly endorses Goodman’s riddle and its chief consequences – nature does not dictate any organizing scheme to us, and different schemes need have no connection to one another. (shrink)

The thesis asserting the mental dependence of institutional entities is particularly debated in social ontology. One of its implications is the infallibility thesis, according to which the existence of institutional entities requires that some of their properties be known. What are these properties? After presenting the Searlian conception of institutional entities and the kind of mental dependence they manifest, I specify the content of the infallibility thesis. I then show that these properties are the deontic powers associated with these entities, (...) and that the mental attitude towards deontic powers must take the form of practical knowledge. Finally, I show that this interpretation is compatible with the existence of at least some naturalized institutional entities. (shrink)

In chapter 17 of his book, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory , Ian Hacking makes the disquieting claim that “perhaps we should best think of past human actions as being to a certain extent indeterminate.” 1 Against what may appear like the self-evident conception of the past as fixed and unalterable, Hacking suggests that when it comes to human conduct and experience, there are reasons to adopt a more flexible view. This suggestion (...) has caused lively debate, in the journal History of the Human Sciences and elsewhere. 2 Central to this debate is the question of what it means to use a recently invented vocabulary to redescribe past human affairs. In particular, it is asked: How do the linguistic, cultural and social differences between past and present matter to the possibility of such a redescription's being true? We who do research in the humanities and social sciences often make retroactive redescriptions of precisely this sort. Hence, the debate is clearly of some general importance for how to conceive the goals and methods of our inquiries. My overall aim in this paper is to clarify what we may learn from the clash between Hacking and his critics. (shrink)