History of the Human Sciences

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Indeterminacy in the Past: On the Recent Discussion of Chapter 17 of

Rewriting the Soul
Ian Hacking
History of the Human Sciences 2003; 16; 117
DOI: 10.1177/0952695103016002006
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Vol. 16 No. 2

2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

pp. 117124

[0952-6951(200305)16:2;117124; 033146]

Indeterminacy in the past: on

the recent discussion of chapter
17 of Rewriting the Soul
IAN HACKING

Key words false memory,

PTSD, Rewriting the Soul

making up people,

personal past,

I do not recall ever before publishing a reply to published comments. Texts

once published are public and the author is not the one who ought to defend
himself, or so I think. But it would be rude to refuse the persistent urgings
of the editor, Jim Good, and the hard work of the four authors who have
commented here, others who have commented in print elsewhere (see Roth
for some references), and yet others who have shown me written-out
comments of their own. Whatever be the merits of my chapter, the topic is
important, and I am glad of the controversy it has prompted.
I was certainly dissatisfied when Rewriting the Soul went to press. The
subject-matter of chapter 17 is difficult and I was confused. I had to be
content with putting problems up front in a way that had not been done
before. That was in 1994. Those were the days of virulent skirmishes around
memory, false memory, about who did what to whom psychically as well as
physically, and about who felt what. Those were the days when people were
rediscovering chunks of their own past and seeing them in an entirely new
light. Not just the high bourgeoisie who could afford psychoanalysis, but the
millions who watched Oprah in the afternoon, and the tens of thousands of
new-found memory therapists. Truly a grass-roots phenomenon. I thought
that we did not know what to say about a great many situations that resulted.
Our language and our experience had not yet been honed to the point where
there was anything definitely right or wrong to say.

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One statement in the chapter should be taken to heart. As a cautious

philosopher, I am inclined to say that many retroactive descriptions [new
descriptions given now, of events in the past] are neither definitely correct nor
definitely incorrect (1995: 243; emphasis added). That really needed saying.
The media, the lawcourts, the clinics, and family life were full of confident
assertions and denials about the past as remembered. I was regularly asked to
serve as an expert witness. After the lawyers had talked to me for a while,
they told me to get lost. They heard that in my opinion we often did not
know what to say, even after as many facts were known as could be expected
to be known. You do not want someone like that in the witness-box!
I would compare the situation with familiar observations by many, including Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations 80. If a chair kept appearing and disappearing before our very eyes, we would not know what to say.
Have you rules ready for such cases rules saying whether one may use the
word chair to include this kind of thing? He imagined a bizarre turn of
events for which our ways of talking are not prepared. Less bizarre but otherwise comparable things really do happen. We are not prepared, I think, for
periods of consciousness-raising and changes in ways of life that lead to
revised moralities, new evaluations, new emotions, new feelings. I hope that
the present debate may lead others to reflect more deeply on what all the
present participants know to be great difficulties.
Brevity counsels that I comment only on Sharrock and Leudars two pieces
except to correct Fullers statement that instinctively I am an anti-realist
about knowledge claims in the social sciences (Fuller, 2002: 115). Instinctively
I am a realist. That does not mean that I regard every assertion made in a
social science as true or false. Many assertions in all walks of life are confused,
or humbug, or inapt, or inept, or exhibit one or more other defects that (as a
realist) I reject as neither true nor false even if I find them to be interesting
and food for further thought. The social sciences are no exception. It is true
that I think more humbug passes for good sense in some social sciences than
is the case in most natural sciences but I should have thought that this
opinion confirms my realist instincts.
Thus my instincts lead me to answer a resounding NO to Sharrock and
Leudars opening question, Can we now somehow make a difference to
what actually happened even centuries ago? (2002: 967). Not only instinct
but also considered judgement answers in the negative. Fullers opening
question is Can the identity of an action change after its occurrence, if a more
accurate description becomes available only then? (2002: 115). In my way of
speaking and I am as ordinary language a philosopher as Sharrock and
Leudar could wish actions do not have identities, so for me the question is
moot. Well then, could a past action change because of what happened later?
No, although, as Sharrock and Leudar point out, it may take some later
events to determine what the action was, whether, for example, it was only

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assault and battery, or actually murder, depending on whether the victim died
of his injuries in ways that the law deems to be directly consequent upon the
assault. I very much regret if I have anywhere left the impression that I might
answer either the opening question of Sharrock and Leudar, or that of Fuller,
in the affirmative.
But before I examine what Sharrock and Leudar say about chapter 17, I
need to locate it in a different space from Sharrock and Leudars two sets of
comments. Their abstract puzzled me before I even read their first sentence
or their first question. They discuss, they say, issues that arise from the fact
of conceptual change . I had not thought of myself as discussing conceptual change. That phrase conjures up for me all those post-Kuhnian debates
about whether the introduction of new theories in the natural sciences introduces conceptual change and even incommensurability. The word concept,
for me, has totally intellectualist connotations. I was educated into using it
when reading it as the translation of Freges Begriff. Related words were used
by scholastics and for me it is a scholastic word, or at any rate an academic
one. (It has other uses; e.g. among those who write advertising copy.) In my
chapter I was concerned, as I wrote a couple of paragraphs ago, with changes
in ways of life that lead to revised moralities, new evaluations, new emotions,
new feelings. I realize now that arguing in terms of descriptions of action
could make my discussion, if taken out of the context of the book, seem like
an arid exercise of discussing concept change. And at least once I did use the
word concept. But that is not where the heart of the chapter is, namely lived
and remembered experience.
It became increasingly clear to me that the heart of the reaction by Sharrock
and Leudar is elsewhere, a long-standing problem in the social sciences, the
alignment of first-order and second-order expressions. I have never had that
concern. I was not aware of anything second-order in my descriptions of
various cases in my chapter. They were with one exception all real cases, cited
as such, and I was trying to work as close as possible to the level of those
cases and the participants involved in them. Thus we may notice one difference between the way in which Sharrock and Leudar read my chapter, and
what is written there. On many occasions they lift what I wrote to a higher
level of abstraction than was present in the chapter.
I am not here appealing to authorial intention, which may well be all too
retroactive! I refer to text. I mean, for example, at the foot of the page (2002:
97) they quote some sentences beginning It is almost as if . . ., in which they
add emphasis to my sentence, That is too paradoxical a turn of phrase for
sure. That is extracted from a short paragraph on my page 243 discussing the
claims of Lloyd DeMause and Dennis Donovan that the whole of human
history is awash with child abuse. Donovan mocked Freud for discussing the
Oedipus Complex and not noticing that baby Oedipus had been subjected
to the most loathsome abuse. He had been put out on the rocks to die while

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being pecked by birds. No wonder he had such hang-ups! After mentioning these worthy authors, I wrote, It is almost as if retroactive redescription changes the past. And I said that was too paradoxical a way of putting
it. I believe that to get a proper sense of what was going on, it is important
to take Donovan and DeMause seriously. You need to empathize, at least for
a moment, with the feeling that after you have taken in what they tell us, we
may experience the past differently than we did. Different enough to say the
past is no longer the same But hold! That is too paradoxical a way of
putting it.
Sharrock and Leudar regarded the cited fragment as somewhat inconsistent with my thought that it would perhaps be best to think of past human
action being to a certain extent indeterminate . (The bit in double quotes is
me, the whole in single quotes is Sharrock and Leudar, 2002: 97.) In context
I see no inconsistency. They follow the cited fragment by saying that I may
be vacillating on whether [I have] brought out a paradox. The paragraph in
which the fragment occurs expresses no vacillation. I brought out no paradox.
I said that DeMause and Donovan invited forms of words that were tempting
but too paradoxical to assert.
I do not intend tediously to nit-pick on Sharrock and Leudars use of quotations, but rather to diagnose their disagreement with the chapter as arising
from their desire to move away from the concrete in this case the amazing
but truly heartfelt assertions of Donovan to a higher level of abstraction.
Sharrock and Leudar regularly move to a level of theorizing appropriate
to their goals clarifying how second-order sociology should relate to firstorder descriptions. Hence they may miss what other readers found in my
text. Thus an anonymous referee drew their attention to my work on making
up people (Sharrock and Leudar, 2002: 11011, note 1, cf. Hacking, 1986,
1995b). They speak at once of the anodyne character of this idea: who
nowadays disputes that the lives of people differ because the (for want of a
better word) concepts available to them differ. That is not what making up
people is all about. It is about the interactions between people and how they
are classified, how people may, by a sort of feedback effect, change because
of how they are classified, and change the very sense or boundaries of the
original classifications. If, for want of a better word, we speak of concepts
here, I am not concerned abstractly with the concepts but concretely with the
dynamics of interaction involving concepts, institutions, individuals, moral
sensibility and the like. This dynamic nominalism (which is also a dialectical
realism) may be all wrong, but by golly it does not seem to me to be anodyne.
I suspect that this philosophy was what the anonymous reader had in mind.
That reader may also have seen (as is announced at the start of the book) that
much of the book is a case-history of dynamic nominalism and making up
people.
Do not misunderstand me. I do not say that Sharrock and Leudar misread

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the chapter. They read very carefully. But as they come from a space that is
rather alien to me, they attend to aspects of the chapter that may differ from
what other people notice. Thus for example they say that Hacking generalizes indeterminacy even further there is indeterminacy in personal experiences. Far from being further, this is mostly what chapters 17 and 18 are
about. I now regret that a sequence of examples about other people was introduced, rather as a series of asides. Sharrock and Leudar take them to be the
core of the chapter.
Here is one of the asides. An author in The New York Times had referred
to Alexander Mackenzie, the great explorer, as a child molester for having
married a girl of 13 in 1802 when he was 47 years old. Was he? I have no
problems even today with my short paragraph on this question (the one on
page 242). I think I agree to Sharrock and Leudars much longer description
of the example, except that it characteristically ignores the didactic message
of the author in the Times just dont forget that Alex was a child molester!
They are interested in the question of how a calm and distanced social scientist
should describe the explorer, and lose the moral passion that informed the
author with whom I started.
My examples in this chapter, of Mackenzie, sexual harassment, and above
all Bernice Redick like my use of Lewis Carroll and pornography in the
next chapter and Redick once again in that chapter were examples to think
with. It does not matter what we say about Charles Dodgson or the explorer,
except insofar as we may be trying to advocate a sharpening of morality, or
reflections on our own earlier lack of sensitivity.
Oddly Sharrock and Leudar do not discuss the one case that I mention that
does matter to some people. There was (at the time of publication) a private
members Bill before Parliament in London to pardon some 307 British and
Canadian soldiers who had been shot for desertion. They would now be
judged to have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), so went
the plea, and hence they should have been found innocent and sent for psychiatric treatment. Yes, say pacifists such as I, how much better it would have
been if in 1917 they had been sent to W. H. Rivers or even Henry Head. I am
fully happy with the Bill as passed, which has given some comfort, we are
told, to the descendants of the deserters. But, (I wrote), I am not sure that if
I were a descendant I would not have been more proud of an ancestor who
sanely had the guts to desert. (Do not misunderstand this, I am also proud of
my fathers and uncles medals in a drawer at home; we are allowed to be complicated and confused about such things.)
This is a hard example to think with, especially if you fully accept Allan
Youngs (1995) carefully documented thesis that post-traumatic stress
disorder, the diagnosis, is an artefact of the US Veterans Administration (VA)
hospitals treating Viet Nam war vets. Young points out that part of the diagnosis is more demanding than what fits popular images. The VA required that

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a specific event be identified as the trauma, and gave criteria for an event being
traumatic. I understand but do not entirely agree with Young. Personally I
think that it may be neither definitely correct nor definitely incorrect to say
of those 307 young men that they suffered from PTSD. The diagnosis tailored
to a situation of another era does not seem to me to run back that far, and yet
at the same time does bear on those executed men. Had I been a British MP,
I would have voted for the Bill, but refrained from the rhetoric and disagreed
with the reasons given for the Bill.
This does not mean I adopt a wishy-washy position. It is strong and open
to rebuttal. I assert that it would be (logically) incorrect to assert, with the
advocates of the private members Bill, that the 307 dead men suffered from
PTSD. I also assert that it is also incorrect to say with Allan Young that they
did not have PTSD. This statement about the past is indeterminate, and not
for trifling reasons such as failure of presuppositions.
Neither my cautious, nor Youngs categorical, doubts about retrospective
diagnosis are likely to win the day. The vast majority of clinicians and
historians are saying that as we now understand PTSD, a great many soldiers
in the Great War (191418) suffered from this disorder, including those whom
the British called shell-shocked and those whom the Germans said suffered
from war neuroses. Let us suppose that the criteria for using the label PTSD
become or are already fixed in this way. This supposition means that if
sufficiently many relevant behavioural symptoms were recorded of a person
in the past, and a specific traumatic event can be identified, then (contra
Young and myself) the individual did suffer from PTSD. This is the sort of
situation that led me to use my chapter-title phrase, An Indeterminacy in the
Past. I shall explain.
In 1917 it was not determined that clinical psychiatry would develop as it
has. To illustrate this with an extreme example, in 1917 the outcome (and
indeed the occurrence) of a Second World War was not already determined.
The following was a possibility: Hitler would win such a war, the thousand
years of the Third Reich would begin, and psychiatry would have no use for
weaklings. The war neuroses that so fascinated the mad Jew Sigmund Freud
were weakness; soldiers who complained of them are regularly shot. In this
possible future for 1917, the diagnosis of PTSD, with all the rich history
described by Allan Young, would never come into existence. It was not yet
part of what existed in 1917, that the actual soldiers who were executed had
PTSD. Psychiatric opinion current in 2002, and which I suppose to become
stable, projects the diagnosis of PTSD on to those soldiers. The past has
become more determinate in this way. As Sharrock and Leudar make
admirably plain, this is quite different from an act of assault not being determined to be murder until the victim dies soon afterwards of injuries inflicted.
That does not mean that the identity of an act (of deserting in confused
terror, preceded by a specific trauma, and followed by amnesia and flashbacks)

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is changing or has changed. It is that very act in 1917, the desertion, etc., which
is now asserted by most experts to have involved PTSD. But, to repeat, it was
not determined in 1917 that the act was a consequence of PTSD. Like many
an apparent triviality this can matter. This type of indeterminacy may matter
a great deal when one is rethinking ones own past in the light of newly available categories. And it is that issue in particular that vexed me in chapter 18,
the only moralistic chapter in the book.
In this note I have thought it wise to stay away from Anscombes lovely
but difficult little book Intention a book that engendered an entire branch
of philosophy called action theory. Readers may read my chapter and the
various analyses of our four authors and judge for themselves. But note:
Sharrock and Leudar infer that I want to proliferate actions, to say that there
is more than one old action after new descriptions become available. They
write that certainly I was repeatedly struggling with the inclination to proliferate actions (Sharrock and Leudar, 2002: 100). Categorically not. I have
never felt that inclination. If I am asked to count actions (an odd request) I
am as parsimonious in counting them as Anscombe urged us to be. I deeply
regret any remark of mine that may have suggested the contrary reading.
I have not commented on Roths so generous discussion of my work, and
barely mentioned Fullers. Roth knows my own texts better than I do I had
to look up quite a few of his citations, curious to know where I had said that.
I should take the opportunity to correct one statement of Roths. It is a technical point, but is central to some of my other concerns. He writes that only
within a style of reasoning does a sentence have a truth value (2002: 126).
This refers to my papers of 1983 and 1992 on styles of scientific reasoning. I
introduced, or better, transmuted, this idea from the work of the historian of
science Alisdair Crombie (1994), who was writing about a Western set of
practices of inquiry, beginning with mathematical postulation, passing
through the laboratory, and on to systematic taxonomy. My theory holds that
many of the sentences of the sciences are up for grabs as true or false only
within their respective styles of reasoning. But most assertions made by most
people in most places at most times have a truth value independent of any
style of reasoning. I would never suggest that a sentence such as, I wrote that
book, and then Sharrock and Leudar commented on chapter 17, has a truth
value only within a style of reasoning.
In this note I have thought it most important to try to indicate that in
chapters 17 and 18, the final chapters of the book, I was still close to the
experiences and confusions of real people in the memory-work described in
the book. The inevitable philosophical abstraction of actions under a description, etc., may have led one to think I was striving for some second-order
abstraction from the phenomena. Yes, of course I was making statements of
some generality. I was trying to grapple with quite general aspects of our
moral life that may be illustrated by the phenomena analyzed in the book as

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a whole. I said our ways of talking leave an indeterminacy. Assertions that

seem true or false are, I said, not definitely so or not so. Only by immersion
in real-life complexities can one hope to get a clarification of language that
fits lived experience.
To conclude, if you are moved by this debate to look at my chapter 17,
please read chapter 18 also. A later but related book, Mad Travelers, might
be useful too.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crombie, A. C. (1994) Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition. London:
Duckworth.
Fuller, S. (2002) Making up the Past: a Response to Sharrock and Leudar, History of
the Human Sciences 15(4): 11523.
Hacking, I. (1982) Language, Truth and Reason, in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds)
Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 4866.
Hacking, I. (1986) Making up People, in T. C. Heller, M. Sosna and D. E. Wellbery
(eds) Reconstructing Individualism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
pp. 22236.
Hacking, I. (1992) Style for Historians and Philosophers, Studies in History and
Philosophy 23: 120.
Hacking, I. (1995a) The Looping Effects of Human Kinds, in D. Sperber, D.
Premack and A. J. Premack (eds) Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary
Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 35183.
Hacking, I. (1995b) Rewriting the Soul. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Roth, P. A. (2002) Ways of Pastmaking, History of the Human Sciences 15(4): 12543.
Sharrock, W. and Leudar, I. (2002) Indeterminacy in the Past?, History of the Human
Sciences 15(3): 95115.
Young, A. (1995) The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
IAN HACKING is Professeur au Collge de France, and University Professor,
University of Toronto. He has just sent The Tradition of Natural Kinds to
press. His most recent books are Historical Ontology (2002), The Social Construction of What? (1999), and Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of
Transient Mental Illnesses (1998), long de facto unavailable, but happily now
out in paperback with a new publisher (Harvard University Press, 2002). He
is at present completing a book to be called Styles of Reasoning.

Address: Collge de France, 11, place Marcelin-Berthelot, 75213 Paris

CEDEX 05, France [email: ian.hacking@college-de-france.fr]

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