Vol. 28 No.

16 · 17 August 2006

Making Up People
Ian Hacking

I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified,
and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications. We think of many kinds of
people as objects of scientific inquiry. Sometimes to control them, as prostitutes, sometimes to
help them, as potential suicides. Sometimes to organise and help, but at the same time keep
ourselves safe, as the poor or the homeless. Sometimes to change them for their own good and
the good of the public, as the obese. Sometimes just to admire, to understand, to encourage and
perhaps even to emulate, as (sometimes) geniuses. We think of these kinds of people as definite
classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will be
able to control, help, change, or emulate them better. But it’s not quite like that. They are moving
targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are
changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. I call this the
‘looping effect’. Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not
exist before. I call this ‘making up people’.

What sciences? The ones I shall call the human sciences, which, thus understood, include many
social sciences, psychology, psychiatry and, speaking loosely, a good deal of clinical medicine. I
am only pointing, for not only is my definition vague, but specific sciences should never be
defined except for administrative and educational purposes. Living sciences are always crossing
borders and borrowing from each other.

The engines used in these sciences are engines of discovery but also engines for making up
people. Statistical analysis of classes of people is a fundamental engine. We constantly try to
medicalise: doctors tried to medicalise suicide as early as the 1830s. The brains of suicides were
dissected to find the hidden cause. More generally, we try to biologise, to recognise a biological
foundation for the problems that beset a class of people. More recently, we have hoped to
geneticise as much as possible. Thus obesity, once regarded as a problem of incontinence, or
weakness of the will, becomes the province of medicine, then of biology, and at present we search
for inherited genetic tendencies. A similar story can be told in the search for the criminal
personality.

These reflections on the classification of people are a species of nominalism. But traditional
nominalism is static. Mine is dynamic; I am interested in how names interact with the named. The
first dynamic nominalist may have been Nietzsche. An aphorism in The Gay Science begins: ‘There is
something that causes me the greatest difficulty, and continues to do so without relief:
unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are.’ It ends: ‘Creating new
names and assessments and apparent truths is enough to create new “things”.’ Making up people
would be a special case of this phenomenon.
Around 1970, there arose a few paradigm cases of strange behaviour similar to phenomena
discussed a century earlier and largely forgotten. A few psychiatrists began to diagnose multiple
personality. It was rather sensational. More and more unhappy people started manifesting these
symptoms. At first they had the symptoms they were expected to have, but then they became more
and more bizarre. First, a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean
number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of
symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters. Psychiatrists cast around
for causes, and created a primitive, easily understood pseudo-Freudian aetiology of early sexual
abuse, coupled with repressed memories. Knowing this was the cause, the patients obligingly
retrieved the memories. More than that, this became a way to be a person. In 1986, I wrote that
there could never be ‘split’ bars, analogous to gay bars. In 1991 I went to my first split bar.

This story can be placed in a five-part framework. We have (a) a classification, multiple
personality, associated with what at the time was called a ‘disorder’. This kind of person is now a
moving target. We have (b) the people, those I call ‘unhappy’, ‘unable to cope’, or whatever
relatively non-judgmental term you might prefer. There are (c) institutions, which include clinics,
annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and
Dissociation, afternoon talkshows on television (Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera made a big
thing of multiples, once upon a time), and weekend training programmes for therapists, some of
which I attended. There is (d) the knowledge: not justified true belief, once the mantra of analytic
philosophers, but knowledge in Popper’s sense of conjectural knowledge, and, more specifically,
the presumptions that are taught, disseminated and refined within the context of the institutions.
Especially the basic facts (not ‘so-called facts’, or ‘facts’ in scare-quotes): for example, that
multiple personality is caused by early sexual abuse, that 5 per cent of the population suffer from
it, and the like. There is expert knowledge, the knowledge of the professionals, and there is
popular knowledge, shared by a significant part of the interested population. There was a time,
partly thanks to those talkshows and other media, when ‘everyone’ believed that multiple
personality was caused by early sexual abuse. Finally, there are (e) the experts or professionals who
generate (d) the knowledge, judge its validity, and use it in their practice. They work within (c)
institutions that guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity and status as experts. They study, try to
help, or advise on the control of (b) the people who are (a) classified as of a given kind.

This banal framework can be used for many examples, but roles and weights will be different in
every case. There is no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories of two
different instances of making up people. There is also an obvious complication: there are different
schools of thought. In this first instance, there was the multiple movement, a loose alliance of
patients, therapists and psychiatric theorists, on the one hand, who believed in this diagnosis and
in a certain kind of person, the multiple. There was the larger psychiatric establishment that
rejected the diagnosis altogether: a doctor in Ontario, for example, who, when a patient arrives
announcing she has multiple personality, demands to be shown her Ontario Health Insurance
card (which has a photograph and a name on it) and says: ‘This is the person I am treating, nobody
else.’ Thus there are rival frameworks, and reactions and counter-actions between them further
contribute to the working out of this kind of person, the multiple personality. If my sceptical
colleague convinces his potential patient, she will very probably become a very different kind of
person from the one she would have been had she been treated for multiple personality by a
believer.

I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown
in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful
philosophical language is not prepared for it. Pedantry is in order. Distinguish two sentences:
 A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were many in 1985.

B. In 1955 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way,
they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this
way; but in 1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.

As I see it, both A and B are true. An enthusiast for what is now called Dissociative Identity
Disorder will say, however, that A is false, because people with several ‘alter personalities’
undoubtedly existed in 1955, but were not diagnosed. A sceptic will also say that A is false, but for
exactly the opposite reason: namely, that multiple personality has always been a specious
diagnosis, and there were no real multiples in 1985 either. Statement A leads to heated but
pointless debates about the reality of multiple personality, but in my opinion both sceptics and
enthusiasts can peacefully agree to B. When I speak of making up people, it is B that I have in
mind, and it is through B that the looping effect occurs.

Multiple personality was renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. But that was more than an act of
diagnostic house-cleaning. Symptoms evolve, patients are no longer expected to come with a
roster of altogether distinct personalities, and they don’t. This disorder is an example of what in
my book Mad Travellers (1998) I called a ‘transient mental illness’. ‘Transient’ not in the sense of
affecting a single person for a while and then going away, but in the sense of existing only at a
certain time and place. Transient mental illnesses can best be looked at in terms of the ecological
niches in which they can appear and thrive. They are easy cases for making up people, precisely
because their very transience leads cynics to suspect they are not really real, and so could plausibly
be said to be made up.

We now read of an autism epidemic and an obesity epidemic, just as we used to read about the
multiple personality epidemic (and an epidemic of child abuse). The conception of autism has
evolved, as I discussed in the 11 May issue of the LRB (/the-paper/v28/n09/ian-hacking/what-is-tom-saying-to-
maureen) . In 1992, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a reliable desktop dictionary
that tries to keep in touch, defined autism as: ‘1. Abnormal introversion and egocentricity;
acceptance of fantasy rather than reality. 2. Psychology: Infantile autism.’ In 2000 it gave: ‘A
psychiatric disorder of childhood characterised by marked deficits in communication and social
interaction, preoccupation with fantasy, language impairment and abnormal behaviour, usually
associated with intellectual impairment.’ The first sense of 1992 derives from the usage coined by
the great Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908, as the name for the behaviour of some of his
schizophrenic patients. The second 1992 sense, ‘infantile autism’, was a transfer from the first
sense and was introduced by Leo Kanner in 1943.

The 2000 definition is about as good as you can do with so few words. It could have added the
obsession with literalness, the obsession with order and keeping things the same, the terrible
tantrums, biting and hitting that follow when things cease to be the same. It could have added
that most people with autism, about four out of five, are male. It could have added the habit of
echoing what has been said, rather than speaking. In short, it could have added lots more, but the
definition is not bad.

The definition is certainly wrong about one thing: autism is not just a childhood disorder, but
almost always for life. It is a developmental disorder that can be recognised very early, usually no
later than 30 months, for which there is no known cause and no known cure. At most, it is widely
believed, a child can learn to compensate for the deficits, although there are some remarkable
recoveries. Another aspect of the definition at which many would protest is its regarding autism as
a ‘disorder’, now the standard euphemism for mental illness. Many advocates for autism insist that
it is not a disorder but a disability.

In 1943, indeed in 1973, autism was a rare developmental disorder with a quite definite, narrowly
characterised stereotype. Today, we have the autistic spectrum. We have high-functioning people
with autism. We have Asperger’s, a name introduced into English in 1981 by the British psychiatric
social worker Lorna Wing. It is adapted from a diagnosis made in 1944 in Vienna by Hans
Asperger, a distinguished paediatrician in the German-speaking world, whom Wing made
prominent in English. It now tends to refer to people who had few difficulties acquiring language,
but have all the other autistic symptoms. It is often loosely synonymous with high-functioning
autism.

Consider a certain kind of teenager or adult, the high-functioning autist. (I shall leave Asperger
out of it.) The typical case is someone who grew from an autistic child into an adult who had full
or almost full possession of language, and some residual eccentricities of an autistic sort, some of
which are socially disadvantageous, some possibly advantageous. Temple Grandin is the most
famous example. She emphasises her empathy with animals, urging that her way of seeing the
world is closer to that of animals than to most humans. She has had a significant effect on
American slaughterhouse techniques. High-functioning autists are beginning to crop up in
fiction, much as multiple personalities did twenty years ago. Some high-functioning autistic
people talk of forming an autism liberation front. Stop trying to make us like you. We do some
things better than you, and you do some things better than us, so leave us be.

Now let’s try out A and B for high-functioning autism:

A. There were no high-functioning autists in 1950; there were many in 2000.

B. In 1950 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way,
they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this
way; but in 2000 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.

As I said, A in my view is true for multiple personality. But it is absolutely false for high-
functioning autism. It is almost as absurd as saying that autism did not exist before 1943, when
Kanner introduced the name. But B, I believe, is true. Before 1950, maybe even before 1975, high-
functioning autism was not a way to be a person. There probably were a few individuals who were
regarded as retarded and worse, who recovered, retaining the kinds of foible that high-functioning
autistic people have today. But people didn’t experience themselves in this way, they didn’t interact
with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in the way they do now.

As I see it, this kind of person, in the sense of B, could not have existed until some time after
autism itself had been diagnosed, for the first such individuals had to be diagnosed as autistic and
then somewhat mysteriously ‘recover’, grow out of it, acquire social skills, be able to understand
what other people are thinking and feeling, overcome, or at any rate live unproblematically with,
the obsessive need for literalness. Once there were ‘recovered’ autists, other adults, who had never
been diagnosed as autistic, could be seen as having similar difficulties, even if their childhood was
not as bad. Hence the class of high-functioning autists rapidly expanded. Some will have strengths
in one direction, some strengths in another.

How does making up people take place? Long ago, ‘hip’ and ‘square’ became common names in
white middle-class culture. By a parody of Nietzsche, two new kinds of people came into being,
the hip and the square. As is the way of slang imported from another social class, both kinds had
short shelf lives. But I am concerned with the human sciences, from sociology to medicine, and
they are driven by several engines of discovery, which are thought of as having to do with finding
out the facts, but they are also engines for making up people. The first seven engines in the
following list are designed for discovery, ordered roughly according to the times at which they
became effective. The eighth is an engine of practice, the ninth of administration, and the tenth is
resistance to the knowers.

1. Count!
2. Quantify!
3. Create Norms!
4. Correlate!
5. Medicalise!
6. Biologise!
7. Geneticise!
8. Normalise!
9. Bureaucratise!
10. Reclaim our identity!

The success of the seven engines of discovery has been astonishing. It is no criticism to say that
they have side effects, that they sometimes bring new kinds of people into being, in the modest
sense of proposition B, and that they affect the kinds of people they study.

Here are some brief illustrations of what I mean by each of my ten engines. I shall use autism and
obesity as contrasting illustrations. They remind us that the ten engines work in different ways on
different kinds of people.

1. Counting. The first large-scale, well-designed attempt to count autistic children was made in
Camberwell, getting a rate of 4.5 per 10,000, which may still be about right for core autism, as
opposed to the extended autistic spectrum. There are now about eighty published countings, and
growing, as is the proportion of people with autism. On 4 May, Reuters reported that ‘the first
national surveys of autism show the condition is very common among US children.’ Well, not so
common: 57 per 10,000. You will know the horror figures for obesity rates. There is, however, a big
difference between autism and obesity, which is nowadays even more assiduously counted than
autism. Whether obesity is as bad as it ought to be or not, its prevalence has immensely increased,
all over the world, in the past two decades. In contrast, we debate whether the swollen figures for
autism show that the prevalence of autism is increasing, or only that we have expanded definitions
and are more alert for possible diagnoses.

2. Quantity. In the case of obesity, quantity is built in. We have our bathroom scales. In 1903, the
Society of Actuaries and the Association of Life Insurance Medical Directors of America defined
being ‘overweight’ as weighing more than the average for insured people of one’s own age, height
and sex, and obesity as ‘an excessive accumulation of body fat’. During the 1970s, the Body Mass
Index took hold, the ratio of the weight of a person in kilogrammes divided by the square of their
height in metres. In 1998, the World Health Organisation, in company with numerous national
bodies, defined being overweight as having a BMI of more than 25, and obesity as a BMI of more
than 30. For a sense of what these numbers mean, Leopold Bloom had a BMI of 23.8. Marilyn
Monroe varied between 21 and 24. ‘Underweight’ is defined as below 18.5. During the past twenty
years models in Playboy have gone down from 19 to 16.5. Fauja Singh, the fastest man on earth over
the age of 90, has a BMI of 15.4. Autism resists quantity. There are many diagnostic
questionnaires, but it’s hard to quantify deficits.
3. Norms. Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1943) showed how medicine
acquired the concept of normalcy not long after 1800. Many of our examples are deviations from
the norm, for better (genius) or worse (obesity). Canguilhem addressed the question: which
comes first, normalcy or deviance? There is no general answer. Sometimes one, sometimes the
other, often hand in hand. Quantitative norms followed Adolphe Quetelet’s homme moyen in the
mid-19th century. To say that autism is a developmental disorder is to say that autistic children do
not develop normally. Norms for development – the ages at which children usually do such and
such; can be expected to do such and such; ought to be able to do such and such (tie their
shoelaces) – are a standard part of manuals on child-rearing for parents.

4. Correlation. This is the fundamental engine of the social sciences. It began around 1870, when
Francis Galton devised the correlation coefficient. Quetelet had the mean, but Galton made
deviation from the mean the core of his social philosophy, and so devised the correlation
coefficient. We try to correlate autism with everything, not excluding the relative lengths of the
mother’s fingers and amount of testosterone in the foetus. Some correlations need no statistical
theory or analysis: four out of five children with autism are male. On the other hand, bodyweight
needs subtle statistics. A BMI between 25 and 30 is said to be bad for you because of a significant
correlation with numerous risk factors, which are themselves statistical entities. It is a strange
situation. Being overweight, unlike being obese, does not importantly affect your life expectancy,
but unless you are a body builder or rugby forward, it will make you less attractive in current
society, less physically active and so forth.

5. Clinical medicine. We medicalise kinds of deviant people relentlessly, not always with success. The
modern concept of child abuse was introduced by doctors around 1960, but there have been
substantial battles over the ‘medical model’ ever since. There have always been fat people, some of
them ill. But stout, plump persons have often been in fashion, as the works of Rubens or Renoir
remind us. ‘Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.’
Today, we treat the stout as having medical problems, and the obese as needing medical
instruction. A new generation of anti-craving medicines is about to make a fortune for its owners.
Autism was regarded as a diagnosis made by a child psychiatrist, and so it is filed as a mental
disorder and hence in the end as a medical problem. But if we regard it more and more as a
disability, it may seem less and less medical.

6. Biology, including neurology. Autism is a disability but it has biological causes, specifically
neurobiological. One of the great moral benefits of biologising is that it relieves a person of
responsibility. If overeating is attributed to chemical imbalance it ceases to be a moral defect.

7. Genetics. There is now a constant drive to trace the medical to the biological, and the biological to
the genetic. This is not wholly new. A century ago, there was a great push to discover the genetic
origins of criminal behaviour, of the criminal personality and so forth.

8. Normalisation. In many cases, we try to make unfavourable deviants as close to normal as

9. Bureaucracy. Some schools of thought speak of bureaucratic power as if it were always a bad
thing. So let me emphasise the positive. Most prosperous nations have quite complex
bureaucracies that pick out children with developmental problems in the early years of schooling,
and assign them to special services. The system sees itself as an objective way to determine who
needs help, but the relation is reciprocal. The criteria used by the system in turn define what it is
to fall under various categories such as autistic. There is an ongoing feedback effect. Once again,
obesity is a contrast case, for it has not yet in any important way been bureaucratised.

10. Resistance. Kinds of people who are medicalised, normalised, administered, increasingly try to
take back control from the experts and institutions, sometimes by creating new experts, new
institutions. The famous case is homosexuality, so highly medicalised from the time of Krafft-
Ebing late in the 19th century. That was the very period in which legal institutions became active
in punishing it. Gay pride and its predecessors restored to homosexuals a control of the
classifications into which they fall. There are always twists and turns in the tales of making up
people, few more striking than the attempts to geneticise male homosexuality, to find the gay
gene.

I mentioned motions towards an ‘autism liberation front’, something that would make high-
functioning autistic people the experts on their condition. There are a number of organisations of
overweight and obese people trying to reinstall pride and dignity in heavy bodies. I like, both for
its acronym and its activities, a rather modest and cautious French organisation: Groupe de
Réflexion sur l’Obésité et le Surpoids, or GROS.

All ten engines, including the seven engines of discovery, produce effects on the kinds of people to
whom they are applied. They change the boundaries. They change the characteristics. My names
and my sorting of modes of inquiry may be eccentric, but they are readily recognisable.
Conjectures about obesity and autism abound but, fortunately, there is competition. Different
groups make different guesses about which will be corroborated. We might find that there is no
genetic basis for autism, and none for all but a small proportion of obese persons. Or we might
find that most obesity and all autism are linked to certain organisations of genetic anomalies. It is
important to know. We find out thanks to the seven scientific engines, and we usually end up
knowing more than we did before. I observe only that we tend to think of the engines as directed
at fixed targets. The targets, however, do not stay still. This in no way calls into question the
objectivity of the engines of discovery.

There may be, in the genetic make-up of human beings, a rather rare set of genetic anomalies that
is responsible for most cases of autism. If so, it is a fixed target at which we aim, although we don’t
know what it is. The anomalies (if there are such) cause a person to be autistic. They do not
determine the ways of life for autistic people. If we came to know such a set of anomalies, they
might even redefine autism, excluding children who are thought to be autistic because of their
behaviour. Think about the ways that the disability we call autism has changed its contours and its
lived experience during the past sixty years. That is the moving target.

Often when we try to generalise we go into the species mode. Indeed, there are books called The
Autistic Child and The Obese Child. But some autism advocates strongly object to speaking of ‘the
autistic child’ and prefer ‘children with autism’. One can sense what they are opposing. To speak in
the species mode about people is to depersonalise them, to turn them into objects for scientific
inquiry. Other thoughtful people feel that ‘autistic child’ is just right. A parent who founded the
Autism Society of America, and wrote one of the first books about the topic, did so because
‘autism is who my son is, not just a characteristic.’ It is part of the boy’s nature to be autistic.
Except in very rare cases, I am disinclined to say the same thing of an obese person. Being
overweight is always just a characteristic: it is never who the stout man is, just one of his enduring,
and maybe endearing, properties.
John Stuart Mill, the progenitor of the doctrine of natural kinds, left us a good way to distinguish
the two. Giving horse and phosphorus as examples, he argued that there are endless characteristics
associated with some classifications; thus horses (and phosphorus) have innumerable features in
common, in addition to their being horses (or phosphorus), while white things have nothing
much in common except that they are white. Horse, he wrote, was a ‘real kind’ (of animal), what
philosophers later came to call a natural kind. White was merely a finite kind. He worried about
whether the races and sexes were real or finite kinds, and opted for members of the different races
having no more in common than their race, just as Christians have nothing in common except
their faith. The races and sexes are therefore not real kinds.

Mill’s distinction expresses well the idea that ‘autism is who my son is, not just a characteristic.’
Autistic children have a wide range of characteristics in common, distributed on a spectrum, or, I
prefer to say, in a space that is at least three-dimensional. Some of these are built into diagnostic
interview schedules for detecting aspects of the autistic spectrum. Others, less behavioural, are
unknown, and are, so far, hidden in bio-neuro-genetic space. This is not true of overweight
people. They have little in common except that they are rather plump. It is not true of obese
people: they have nothing in common except that they are fat. There may be subclasses of obese
people who have a distinct biological cause for their having a BMI in the very high range. Whatever
it is may be part of their nature, and may bring in a host of other characteristics. That subclass
would come close to being what Mill called a ‘real kind’.

A vigorous school of cognitive science argues that the tendency to treat kinds of things and kinds
of people as if they had essences is innate in the human mind. It does not claim that there are
metaphysical essences: only that we innately think and act as if there were. I am sceptical. Perhaps
this tendency might be better studied under the heading of the historical anthropology of
scientific reason. The cognitivists will protest that their results are confirmed cross-culturally and
apply to six-year-olds. Well, yes: to six-year-olds who grow up anywhere in the world of scientific
reason, what Marshall Sahlins calls ‘the world system’.

It is part of our scientific attitude that what we find out about people using any of the seven
engines of discovery, and more, is a fixed target. We usually hit something, and then we say that
what we hit was what we were aiming at. What we find out about it is for the most part true, or not
far from the truth. Yet the target that we hit is often where it is because of the interaction between
our five elements, ranging from classifications through people to experiments. Sometimes this
breeds conceptual confusion. There may be no better example than the changing faces of suicide.

Suicide is now tied to depression. ‘An attempted suicide is a cry for help.’ Nothing is more
shattering than the suicide of a friend. Nothing more smashes the spirit of a psychiatrist than the
suicide of a patient. Nothing seems more awful than for young people to kill themselves. When a
wave of suicides passes through an adolescent cohort in a native village in northern Canada, well-
meaning citizens in the south are steeped in shame and guilt. This wholly modern feel to suicide,
and the gamut of associated meanings, is a product of interaction with statistical and medical
sciences, a family of interactions that began around 1825. This modern arrangement of intense
feelings and meanings makes us totally confused when we think about either euthanasia or
suicide bombing.

The latter is a ruthless weapon, often callously exploited by older men who have no intention of
killing themselves. It is nevertheless a remarkable response by angry young Muslims who feel
impotent when faced by omnipotent hegemony. It can be used by anyone: Tamil Tigers developed
much of the early technology. The suicide weapon is the polar opposite of the invincible nuclear
weapon. But they are a match, equally indifferent to whom they kill. We have great difficulty
thinking about the suicide weapon because of our established scientific knowledge about suicide.
That knowledge is nevertheless true knowledge about people in our society, the suicides and those
who meditate self-destruction. They have grown through their lives to conform to the meanings
and the stereotypes that the knowledge teaches.

Genius has put on an amazing number of masks since the word was used with such effect in
antiquity. The term – I hardly dare to call it a ‘concept’, but perhaps one could say ‘cluster of
associated ideas’ – maps the fantasies of the age: Athens in its prime, Elizabethan England,
Romantic Germany, Fin de Siècle France. But genius is not a serious concept in our times. It has
quite lost the allure of the Romantic era. That is because we now measure it, and genius of its
nature abhors a measure.

Starting with Galton’s Hereditary Genius, we have gradually made intelligence statistical, with
norms. Indeed, the usual IQ tests are so statistical that the questions are designed in such a way
that a curve of scores forms a normal distribution with a mean of 100. When the tests were first
applied to women, they scored higher than men, with a mean of about 105, so the questions had to
be modified to make them harder for women. They were adjusted until the mean score for females
was also 100.

IQ tests are excellent at evaluating the ability of a numerate and technical child, possessing a new
kind of literacy, to prosper in our times. At the top end, genius is forced onto a linear scale and
hence off the map. Galton aimed to measure genius but in fact he expelled it from our culture. It is
part of the deep, ultimately Socratic notion of genius, that when it is measured on scales that stem
from Galton, and were refined in 1917 by the United States army for evaluating recruits, true
genius – I don’t hesitate to use that phrase – will be living somewhere else. It will blithely refuse to
interact with questionnaires, institutions, experts and knowledge, rejecting classification. Ah, as
you see, I have just bought into the Romantic notion of genius.

Letters
Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006

Ian Hacking describes Lorna Wing, the world’s outstanding autism expert, as a psychiatric social
worker (LRB, 17 August). In fact, she is a consultant psychiatrist.

Michael Fitzgerald
Trinity College, Dublin