I was quite underwhelmed by Manvir Singh’s book review—and that’s what justified the piece, wasn’t it? That it was a collective book review— and I say this as someone who is excited by the work of Ian Hacking* and was thrilled to find it cited in a mainstream publication. I just checked the table of contents again, and it is listed as a feature, but it feels misplaced. It also felt like a disservice to the books in question, as his position was more relevant (and possibly could have been developed more?) in dialogue with Sarah Fay’s 2022 memoir/history of the DSM Pathological. But we couldn’t do a book review that far after publication in the New Yorker, I guess.
*(Hacking’s work on “dynamic nominalism”—and I always thought the fugue state was more his famous case than MPD—is also the sort of sociology of scientific knowledge that can easily be used as an attack on the psychiatric field in damaging ways, the way that intellectual creationism defenders tend to be more sophisticated about Popper’s falsifiability criteria for scientific hypotheses, and thus about the nature of science, than they are given credit for. Once you understand the atom, you can split it, I guess.)
I was quite underwhelmed by Manvir Singh’s book review—and that’s what justified the piece, wasn’t it? That it was a collective book review— and I say this as someone who is excited by the work of Ian Hacking* and was thrilled to find it cited in a mainstream publication. I just checked the table of contents again, and it is listed as a feature, but it feels misplaced. It also felt like a disservice to the books in question, as his position was more relevant (and possibly could have been developed more?) in dialogue with Sarah Fay’s 2022 memoir/history of the DSM Pathological. But we couldn’t do a book review that far after publication in the New Yorker, I guess.
*(Hacking’s work on “dynamic nominalism”—and I always thought the fugue state was more his famous case than MPD—is also the sort of sociology of scientific knowledge that can easily be used as an attack on the psychiatric field in damaging ways, the way that intellectual creationism defenders tend to be more sophisticated about Popper’s falsifiability criteria for scientific hypotheses, and thus about the nature of science, than they are given credit for. Once you understand the atom, you can split it, I guess.)