This article takes up issues raised in the debate over what Ian Hacking has labelled `an indeterminacy in the past'. It addresses certain criticisms of Wes Sharrock and Ivan Leudar, and attempts to develop further the idea that difficulties with retroactive redescription reflect a deep indeterminacy about certain past actions. It suggests that there are in fact two distinct but related indeterminacies at issue, and that these may best be understood in the context of Hacking's theses about the historical constitution of social phenomena and the looping effect of human kinds.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957) Intention. Oxford: Blackwell .
2.
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1979) `Under a Description' , in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Papers, Vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , pp. 208-219 .
3.
Davidson, D. (1980) Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press .
4.
Hacking, I. (1988) `The Sociology of Knowledge about Child Abuse' , Noûs22: 53-63 .
5.
Hacking, I. (1992) `World-Making by Kind-Making: Child Abuse for Example', in M. Douglas and D. Hull (eds) How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman in the Social Sciences. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press , pp. 180-238.
6.
Hacking, I. (1995a) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
7.
Hacking, I. (1995b) `The Looping Effects of Human Kinds', in D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack (eds) Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press , pp. 351-383.
8.
Hacking, I. (1998) Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia .
9.
Hacking, I. (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
10.
Hacking, I. (2002a) Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
11.
Hacking, I. (2002b) `Aristotelian Categories and Cognitive Domains' , Synthese126: 473-515 .
12.
Hacking, I. (2002c) `Inaugural Lecture: Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France, 16 January 2001' , Economy and Society31: 1-14 .
13.
Leudar, I. and Sharrock, W. (1999) review `Multiplying the Multiplicity: Are Dissociative Identity Disorders “Real”?' , British Journal of Psychology90: 451-455 .
14.
Sharrock, W. and Leudar, I. (2002) `An Indeterminacy in the Past?' , History of the Human Sciences15(3): 95-115 .
15.
Sharrock, W. and Leudar, I. (2003) `Action, Description, Redescription and Concept Change - a Reply to Fuller and Roth' , History of the Human Science16(2): 101-115 .
