The Social Construction of What?

Hacking, I. (1999). The Social Construction of What?. Harvard University Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1999

Link

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674004122

Cited from

philosophy, sociology_anthropology

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Classification
  • This clarity highlights three things: (1) classification is active and ongoing, not passive or finished (reclassification happens when categories change or evidence shifts); (2) classification systems are human decisions, designed by people with particular purposes, subject to revision; (3) the same entity can be classified differently under different systems (a person might be classified as "high-risk criminal" under a criminal-justice classification, "low-income" under a wealth classification, and "uninsured" under a health-insurance classification), as Hacking (1999) develops in his philosophical analysis of "looping kinds" and the dynamic, human-designed character of classification.

    This sourcePhilosophical analysis of classification as an active, ongoing, human-designed practice; develops "looping kinds" / interactive kinds in which categorized people respond to and reshape the categories themselves.

• Reification
  • The shape recurs again in qualitative research (a designer-built theme treated as a found pattern), in linguistics (cluster labels like race or personality type read as joints in nature),

    This sourceExamines how constructed classifications of people are read as joints in nature, the categorical case of reification.

• Social Construction of Reality
  • It is not relativism that all claims are equally valid: within a constructed system, claims can be more or less accurate (whether a bill is counterfeit, whether a marriage is valid under a jurisdiction), and different constructed systems can be evaluated on various criteria (internal consistency, fit with brute facts, consequences)

    This sourcePhilosophical analysis of classification as an active, ongoing, human-designed practice; develops the notion of "looping kinds" in which categorized entities respond to and reshape the categories themselves.

Verification

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